Air raid sirens blared over Ukraine's capital, as officials said they were bolstering defenses in key cities threatened by Russian forces.
LVIV, Ukraine -- Air raid sirens blared over Ukraine's capital on Wednesday and officials said they bolstered defenses in key cities threatened by Russian forces, as authorities renewed efforts to evacuate civilians from besieged urban areas.
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.
"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. 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.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.
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 for the 430,000 residents.
Tuesday brought no relief: An attempt to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine through a designated safe corridor failed, with Ukrainian officials saying Russian forces had fired on the convoy before it reached the city.Natalia Mudrenko, a senior member of Ukraine's U.N. Mission, told the Security Council that the people of Mariupol have"been effectively taken hostage" by the siege.
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