Amid effort to rescue civilians, Zelensky urges end to ‘ping-pong’ over Polish jets

Renewed efforts to evacuate civilians from besieged and bombarded Ukrainian cities were underway Wednesday as conditions became increasingly dire.

Days of shelling have largely cut residents of the southern city of Mariupol off from the outside world and forced them to scavenge for food and water.

Authorities announced another ceasefire to allow civilians to escape from Mariupol, Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east, and several towns in the region around the capital, Kyiv.

Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors have largely failed due to attacks by Russian forces, and there were few details on Wednesday’s new effort.

But air raid sirens repeatedly went off in Kyiv and explosions could be heard there, raising tensions in the rattled city.

Mariupol, where nearly half of the population of 430,000 is hoping to flee, has been surrounded by Russian forces for days. Corpses lie in the streets, and people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, sheltering from the Russian shells pounding the strategic port on the Azov Sea.

“Why shouldn’t I cry?” resident Goma Janna demanded as she wept by the light of an oil lamp below ground, surrounded by women and children. “I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children.”

One evacuation did appear successful on Tuesday, with Ukrainian authorities saying 5,000 civilians, including 1,700 foreign students, managed to escape from Sumy, a city of a quarter-million people that has seen intense shelling.

That corridor will reopen for 12 hours on Wednesday, with the buses that took people southwest to the city of Poltava the day before returning to pick up more residents, regional administration chief Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said.

Priority was being given to pregnant women, women with children, older people and those with disabilities.

The UN estimates that more than 2.15 million people have fled the country in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

Many more have become trapped inside cities bombarded and encircled by Russian forces, who have seen their advance slowed by fiercer than expected Ukrainian resistance.

“Behind the monolithic statistics are two million stories of separation, anguish, and loss,” UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said.

Families have been “senselessly ripped apart,” plunged into “despair and unimaginable suffering” by the “brutal war,” he said.

Kyiv sirens

Meanwhile, back-to-back alerts Wednesday morning urged residents of the capital, Kyiv, to go to bomb shelters quickly amid fears of incoming missiles. The all-clear was given each time, but the intermittent alerts have kept people on edge. Kyiv has been relatively quiet in recent days, though Russian artillery has pounded the outskirts of the city.

The crisis is growing in the capital for civilians, with the situation particularly critical in the city’s suburbs, said Kyiv regional administration head Oleksiy Kuleba.

“Russia is artificially creating a humanitarian crisis in the Kyiv region, frustrating the evacuation of people and continuing shelling and bombing small communities,” he said.

On the outskirts of the city, police officers and soldiers helped elderly residents from their homes and people threaded their way along a destroyed bridge as they tried to escape Irpin, a town of 60,000 that has been targeted by Russian shelling.

‘This isn’t ping-pong. It’s human lives’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Wednesday for Western powers to urgently decide on a Polish offer that would see his country supplied with fighter jets.

“When will there be a decision? Look, we’re at war!” Zelensky said in a video on his Telegram channel. “We ask you again to decide as soon as possible. Send us planes.”

On Tuesday, the United States rejected a plan put forward by Poland to send its fleet of Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine via a US air base in Ramstein, Germany.

Poland had suggested that its air force would receive F-16 fighters as replacements.

“We have seen in the media that there are discussions between the American and Polish sides. But we sense that the Polish offer is not supported,” said Zelensky.

“We don’t have time for the media, for all these signals. This isn’t ping-pong. It’s human lives,” he added.

Ukraine ‘holding the line’

Meanwhile, Russian forces placed military equipment on farms and amid residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv, Ukraine’s general staff of the armed forces said in a statement.

In the south, Russians dressed in civilian clothes were advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people, it said.

The Ukrainian military is building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive, the general staff said.

In the south, Russian troops have advanced deep along Ukraine’s coastline in an attempt to establish a land bridge to Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014. As part of those efforts, the Azov Sea port of Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian soldiers for days and a humanitarian crisis is unfolding.