Fighting has been relentless in and around this once-quiet bedroom community, which sits on a crucial road toward Ukraine’s bustling capital and the country’s seat of power. Early Sunday, a shell exploded in the middle of a street where a family was attempting to make their escape. A father, mother, and child were killed, according to reporters at the scene. Irpin Mayor Oleksandr Markushin said about eight people died from Russian shelling on that single day. “Two children died in front of my eyes,” he said in a video posted to his Telegram channel.
Vladimir Putin has lied about his army not targeting civilians in what he calls a “special military operation,” and has also lied about establishing safe corridors for people to flee his deadly violence. There is overwhelming evidence that Russian troops are firing on peaceful people in cities and towns across the country in what appears to be a campaign of terror. Killing an entire young family and five others Sunday was merely the latest proof.
In a video address published to his Telegram channel, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, citing information gleaned from captured Russian troops, said that bombing civilian areas was part of Russia’s plan from the beginning, describing it as “pure evil.”
While the evacuation in Irpin went ahead, albeit with difficulty and under heavy Russian shelling, plans to relocate residents from the cities of Volnovakha and Mariupol in eastern Ukraine collapsed because the artillery fire was too intense and targeted the supposedly safe “green corridors” that civilians were meant to use.
“Amid devastating scenes of human suffering in Mariupol, a second attempt today to start evacuating an estimated 200,000 people out of the city came to a halt,” wrote the International Committee of the Red Cross. “The failed attempts yesterday and today underscore the absence of a detailed and functioning agreement between the parties to the conflict.”
BuzzFeed News has a team on the ground in Ukraine. Follow Chris Miller, Isobel Koshiw, and Pete Kiehart’s reporting on Twitter and read our full coverage here.
As residents from those cities struggled to escape, a huge number of others made their way to western Ukraine and across the border to neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and other European Union countries, as well as Moldova.
“10 days. 1.5 million people. This is now the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tweeted Sunday. “In the coming days millions more lives will be uprooted, unless there is an immediate end to this senseless conflict.” The UNHCR added that it has recorded “1,123 civilian casualties in the country: 364 killed and 759 injured” — very likely an undercount.
In Irpin, most people with whom BuzzFeed News spoke Sunday had no idea where they would go. They just wanted to be someplace where they would be safe. They only had with them what they could carry on their backs and in their hands. They were visibly exhausted and stressed from surviving heavy bombardment for the past week and a half.
At a staging point where more than 20 yellow buses arrived to move them to the Kyiv Central Railway Station, families and friends separated in the chaos frantically searched for one another, worrying that someone might have been left behind.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/christopherm51/irpin-ukraine-people-evacuating-attacked-shelled-russians
