UN calls for safe aid delivery to Ukraine combat zones
UNITED NATIONS, United States — The United Nations needs safe passage to deliver humanitarian aid to conflict zones in Ukraine, a senior official with the organization told the Security Council on Monday.
"Civilians in places like Mariupol, Kharkiv, Melitopol and elsewhere desperately need aid, especially life-saving medical supplies," undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths told an emergency meeting on the disaster sparked by Russia's invasion.
Griffiths urged all sides to ensure that civilians, homes and infrastructure in Ukraine were safeguarded.
"This includes allowing safe passage for civilians to leave areas of active hostilities on a voluntary basis, in the direction they choose," he said, after Ukraine rejected an earlier deal that would only allow its civilians to evacuate into Russia or Belarus.
The meeting came as Ukraine and Russia seek an agreement on creating "humanitarian corridors" out of pummeled cities, as the civilian toll from the Russian assault mounts.
Russia said Monday it would open humanitarian corridors on Tuesday from 0700 GMT, subject to Ukraine's approval, listing evacuation routes from Kyiv as well as Mariupol, Kharkiv and Sumy — all of which have been under heavy Russian attack.
Kyiv's UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, said the conflict had blocked exports through Ukraine's seaports, cutting off vast quantities of agricultural goods vital to the world's food supplies.
"The implications at the global level will be catastrophic," said Kyslytsya, noting that his country produces 55 percent of the world's sunflower oil.
He also warned of the health threat from so many dead lying uncollected on the battlefield.
"We are speaking about dozens of thousands of bodies decomposing in the fields of Ukraine, I'm talking about the bodies of the Russian soldiers," he said, calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross to help repatriate fallen combatants and prisoners of war.
'Mercenaries'
Calling for restraint on all sides, China's ambassador said an already dire situation could only be made worse by shipments of arms to Ukraine, as well as the deployment of "mercenaries."
The Pentagon said Monday that Russia is recruiting Syrians and other foreign fighters as it ramps up its assault on Ukraine.
Tens of thousands of foreign volunteers have also traveled to Ukraine to fight with Kyiv's forces, according to the foreign minister.
Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said there was "information warfare" underway and slammed the ban by Western countries on Russian state media outlets.
Griffiths said the UN also urgently needs a system of "constant communication" with all sides, adding it had sent a team to Moscow for a first technical meeting at the Russian defense ministry.
The goal, he said, is to work on better humanitarian civil-military coordination to be able to "scale up" UN operations.
A senior UN representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials also hoped to ensure that humanitarian convoys were not targeted by Russian attacks.
To date, the UN has had no involvement in the establishment of humanitarian corridors.
Addressing the Council, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Washington's ambassador to the UN, slammed Russia's attack on Ukraine.
"Dozens of children have been killed in (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's war, she said, noting that "actual numbers are likely far greater."
Thomas-Greenfield warned that children were being "severely traumatized" by the violence and destruction to the point of no longer speaking, and that the physical and psychological wounds of the conflict would be long-lasting.
"It's clear Mr. Putin has a plan to brutalize Ukraine," she said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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