Nearly 13,000 Ukrainians evacuated in 24 hours: Iryna Vereshchuk

Kyiv, March 13

In a video address on Saturday night, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that nearly 13,000 civilians were evacuated within 24 hours via nine humanitarian corridors amid the ongoing war.

She said that 8,000 people were evacuated from Sumy, while 3,000 people departed from Krasnopillya, Lebedyn, Velyka Pisarivka and Konotop.

The minister said that almost 1,000 people were evacuated from Bucha, 600 from Hostomel and 1,264 from the combat zone in Nemishayevo.

According to Vereshchuk, evacuation from Energodar in the Zaporizhzhya region was impossible as Russian forces “stopped humanitarian cargo at the checkpoint in Vasylivka, despite previous agreements”.

People could not leave Irpin, Kozarovychi, Borodyanka, and Vorzel in the Kyiv region.

Vereshchuk appealed to the Russian forces to release Oleksiy Ihorovych Danchenko, an employee of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, who accompanied the evacuation buses from Hostomel and has been under captivity for two days, Ukrayinska Pravda reported.

Vereshchuk further said that Ukrainian authorities would open humanitarian corridors in the Kyiv and Luhansk regions on Sunday and evacuate people from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhya.

According to the authorities, Russian forces stopped humanitarian aid moving from Zaporizhzhya to Mariupol.

Church representatives had accompanied the convoy to deter the Russian military from shooting, they said.

The authorities also claimed that Russian forces attacked a convoy of women and children trying to evacuate from the Kyiv region’s Baryshivskyy district.

Seven people were killed, including one child, in the attack. IANS