KYIV: A Russian attack severely damaged a maternity hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukraine said on Wednesday, even as both sides said they had agreed to open more humanitarian corridors to evacuate terrified civilians.

And citizens trying to escape shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv streamed towards the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.

President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Twitter that there were people, including children, under the wreckage of the hospital and called the strike an atrocity. Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded.

Video shared by Zelensky showed cheerfully painted hallways strewn with twisted metal and room after room with blown-out windows. Floors were covered in wreckage. Outside, a small fire burned, and debris covered the ground.

Mariupol’s city council said on its social media site that the damage was colossal.

Authorities announced new ceasefires on Wednesday morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv as well as the southern cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast.

Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors largely failed because of what the Ukrainians said were Russian attacks. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a telephone call with German’s chancellor, accused militant Ukrainian nationalists of hampering the evacuations.

It was not immediately clear whether anyone was able to leave other cities on Wednesday, but people streamed out of Kyiv’s suburbs, many headed for the city centre, even as explosions were heard in the capital and air raid sirens sounded repeatedly.

From there, the evacuees planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack.

Corridors for civilians

As fighting raged on the 14th day of the invasion, safe routes were opening out of five Ukrainian areas including suburbs of the capital Kyiv.

Moscow had vowed to respect a 12-hour truce starting at 9am to allow civilians to flee six areas that have been heavily hit by fighting, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

For the first time the corridors included Irpin, Bucha and Gostomel, a cluster of towns on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv that have been largely occupied by Russian forces.

Another evacuation route is from Sumy, where some 5,000 civilians were able to escape on Tuesday as some 60 buses left the stricken town east of Kyiv near the Russian border.

Vereshchuk said Ukraine has had a “negative experience” of ceasefires not being respected, adding that residents had asked Russia to “keep its promises”.

But Russian forces had made rapid advances towards Kyiv, approaching Brovary, the large eastern suburbs of the capital, AFP journalists saw.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2022