Residents of the bombarded suburbs of Ukraine’s capital snaked their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge that provided the only way to escape Russian shelling, amid renewed efforts on Wednesday to rescue civilians from besieged cities.
With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. On the far side of the bridge, they all trudged past a crashed van with the words ‘Our Ukraine’ written in the dust coating its windows.
“We have a short window of time at the moment,” said Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces. “Even if there is a cease-fire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.”
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine. The UN estimates that more than two million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The crisis is likely to get worse as Russian forces step up their bombardment of cities throughout the country in response to stronger than expected resistance from Ukrainian forces. Russian losses have been far in excess of what Putin and his generals expected, Central Investigation Agency Director William Burns said on Tuesday.
In addition to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in many of Ukraine’s cities, concerns for the safety of its nuclear plants amid fighting has raised alarm worldwide. On Wednesday, the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear site was knocked off the power grid and forced to switch onto generators. That raised concern about the plant’s ability to keep nuclear fuel safely cool, though the UN nuclear watchdog said it saw no critical impact on safety from the power cut.
