Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday criticised Western countries for their “unkept promises” of helping his country defend itself against the attack by Russia.
He said that the responsibility for the deaths in Ukraine rests not just on Russia, but also those “who did not save our cities from airstrikes, from these bombs, missiles, despite the fact that they can”.
The Indian Embassy in Kyiv on Tuesday urged citizens to leave besieged cities in Ukraine using the humanitarian corridor that was set up earlier in the day.
The embassy urged citizens to “evacuate using trains/vehicles or any other available means of transport”.
Evacuation of civilians and foreign students started from Ukraine’s Sumy city to Poltava earlier on Tuesday. At least 694 Indian students are stranded in the city. Previous efforts to rescue the students from the city had failed.
Meanwhile, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said that two million people have fled Ukraine due to the ongoing attack by Russia.
10.22: United States President Joe Biden announces a ban on all imports of Russian oil and gas.
Biden says that through this action, his country is “targeting a main artery of Russia’s economy”.
10.00 pm: India’s Ministry of External Affairs posts a video of Indian citizens who were evacuated from Ukraine’s northeastern city of Sumy. The Centre claims that Indian officials have been able to move all Indian students out of the city.
9.50 pm: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy castigates Western countries for their “unkept promises” of helping his country defend itself against the attack by Russia, AFP reports.
He says that the responsibility for the deaths in Ukraine rests not just on Russia, but also those “who did not save our cities from airstrikes, from these bombs, missiles, despite the fact that they can”.
9.44 pm: United States President Joe Biden will on Tuesday announce actions to “to continue to hold Russia accountable for its unprovoked and unjustified war on Ukraine,” the White House says, according to AP.
6.40 pm: The Ministry of External Affairs says that all Indian students have been evacuated from Sumy, reports PTI.
5.35 pm: India’s Embassy in Kyiv urges citizens to leave besieged cities using the humanitarian corridor that was set up earlier today. The embassy urges Indian citizens to “evacuate using trains/vehicles or any other available means of transport”.
It adds that the establishment of another humanitarian corridor is uncertain in view of the security situation.
5.20 pm: Ukraine and Russia made a small amount of progress on logistics for the evacuation of civilians, but no agreement was reached on the broader situation, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak says, according to Reuters.
The foreign ministers of Russia and Turkey are slated to meet in Turkey on March 10.
5.10 pm: Visuals from ANI show a convoy of buses carrying Indian students leaving the city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine.
5.00 pm: Oil company Shell says it intends to withdraw from all Russian oil and gas, amid the ongoing attack on Ukraine.
“As an immediate first step, we will stop all spot purchases of Russian crude oil, shut service stations, aviation fuels & lubricants operations in Russia,” the company says.
4.45 pm: Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that Russian forces are shelling a humanitarian corridor from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol in the southeastern part of the country. The corridor has been established to provide aid and to evacuate civilians.
4.30 pm: Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba claims that Russia is holding about 3,00,000 civilians hostage in Mariupol city in the southeastern part of the country. He also claims that a child died due to dehydration in the city yesterday.
Kuleba urges countries to publicly ask Russia to let civilians leave the city.
4.20 pm: Dozens of buses are heading towards the city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine as part of efforts to evacuate civilians, Al-Jazeera reports. The convoy is being led by a police escort.
Earlier, two attempts had been made to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, but they had to be stalled on account of Russian attacks. Russia, however, had claimed that Ukrainian forces blocked civilians from leaving the area.
4.15 pm: The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, says that two million people have fled Ukraine due to the ongoing attack by Russia.
3.55 pm: Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri says that 694 Indian students, who were stranded in Sumy, have left for Poltava in buses, reports PTI. “Last night, I checked with the control room, 694 Indian students were remaining in Sumy. Today, they have all left in buses for Poltava,” he says.
3.35 pm: Ukraine’s foreign ministry claims that 12,000 Russian personnel have been killed since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
The ministry says Russian forces have also lost 48 aircraft, 80 helicopters, 303 tanks, 1,036 armed vehicles, 120 artillery pieces and 27 anti-aircraft warfare systems.
3.10 pm: Ukraine says it has already started the evacuation of civilians from Sumy to Poltava, including foreign students. “We call on Russia to agree on other humanitarian corridors in Ukraine,” a tweet by the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs says.
2.40 pm: The Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs is calling on Russia to uphold ceasefire during the evacuation of civilians and foreign students from Sumy.
“We call on Russia to uphold its ceasefire commitment, to refrain from activities that endanger the lives of people and to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid,” the ministry says.
2.35 pm: Evacuation of Indian students stranded in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy has started.
Anuj Kumar, a final year student, says the buses will soon leave Sumy, where around 600 Indian students are stranded. More details here.
2.30 pm: The World Bank says it has approved more than $700 in emergency support for Ukraine, reports The Associated Press.
The aid is meant to help the Ukrainian government pay wages of hospital workers, pensions and other social programs.
12.20 pm: The mayor of Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, says they are struggling to feed and house thousands of people who have arrived in the city from war-torn regions of the country, according to The Associated Press.
“We really need support,” Mayor Andriy Sadovyi says. The city is the main transit point for those fleeing from Ukraine to Poland.
12.10 pm: Pakistan says it has sent an aircraft to Poland to evacuate more than 300 Pakistanis who escaped fighting in Ukraine, The Associated Press reports. According to Pakistan International Airlines says most of them are students.
12 pm: Germany says it will host a virtual meeting of agricultural ministers from G7 countries on March 11 to discuss the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on global food security, reports Reuters.
11.50 am: Visuals from Ukraine:
10.49 am: Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world, according to sanctions watchlist site Castellum.ai.
On February 22 when Moscow recognised the separatists territories Donetsk and Luhansk, 2,754 sanctions were already in place against Moscow, the site said.
After this, 2,778 more sanctions were imposed on the countrin, pushing the tally to 5,532. With this, Russia outranked Iran’s 3,616 sanctions.
10.42 am: Children are among those who died in the Russian air raid on residential buildings in Sumy city, reports The Kyiv Independent. On Monday, Dmitry Zhivitsky, the head of Sumy Regional State Administration, had said that at least 10 people were killed in the bombings.
10.32 am: Ukrainian officials say that Russian aircraft bombed cities in eastern and central Ukraine in the night, reports the Associated Press. They say the suburbs of Kyiv were also shelled.
10.31 am: Japanese automaker Nissan is planning to suspend production at its plant in Russia due to “logistical challenges”, reports the Associated Press.
The company did not provide a specific date but said production will stop “soon.” I
10.28 am: Russian President Vladimir Putin releases a video saying that conscripts and reservists are not being called up to fight on the frontline against Ukraine, reports BBC.
“Let me emphasise that soldiers who are doing military service do not and will not participate in hostilities... the assigned tasks are solved only be professional military men,” he says.
10.12 am: Russia threatens to cut off gas supplies to Europe and warned that the price of oil could rise to $300 (around Rs 23,000) per barrel if western countries step up their economic sanctions against Moscow by banning energy imports, reports The Guardian.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak noted that Germany had frozen the certification of Nord Stream 2 last month.
“We have every right to take a matching decision and impose an embargo on gas pumping through the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline,” he adds.
Nord Stream is a system of offshore natural gas pipelines in Europe, running under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany.
8.27 am: Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya says that the Russian invasion has brought Ukraine to “the brink of humanitarian catastrophe of potentially global nature”, reports the Associated Press.
8.21 am: Ukraine says that Russian attacks were preventing civilians from safely evacuating their besieged cities, reports the BBC. Tens of thousands of people across Ukraine are stuck without power. In Mariupol city, several people were running low on food and water, according to the news channel.
8.18 am: The World Bank approves an emergency financing of $723 million, or over Rs 5,562 crore, to help Ukraine’s government pay public-sector wages, welfare and pensions, reports the BBC.
The bank says the package incorporated funding from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.
8.17 am: Two climbers scale the tallest building in Paris without using any ropes or special equipment in solidarity with Ukraine, reports AFP.
8.15 am: The International Atomic Energy Agency says Ukraine has informed the watchdog that a nuclear research facility has been damaged by shelling in Kharkiv city.
In a statement, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi says the incident, however, did not cause any increase in radiation levels at the site.
8.09 am: Volunteers from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Lithuania and Mexico have already joined Ukraine’s military and were fighting outside of Kyiv, reports The Kyiv Independent, citing the Ukrainian military forces.
7.37 am: A Russian general was killed in the fighting around Kharkiv, claims Ukrainian defence ministry, The Kyiv Independent reports. The deceased was identified as General Vitaly Gerasimov. Russia has not yet spoken about this.
7.30 am: Russia’s United Nations Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, announces new ceasefire for Tuesday morning, reports AP.
“This proposal doesn’t have any demands about the citizens being sent necessarily to Russia, into Russian territory,” he says at the end of a UN Security Council meeting. “There’s also evacuation offered towards Ukrainian cities to the west of Kyiv, and ultimately it will be the choice of the people themselves where they want to be evacuated to.”
This comes after Russia’s announcement early on Monday to create humanitarian corridors for civilians to evacuate Kharkiv, Sumy, Mariupol and the capital, Kyiv, was rejected by Ukraine.
A look at the developments from Monday:
- Ukrainian authorities declined the Russian Army’s offer of creating humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians in the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy and Mariupol. Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called the Russian proposal “immoral” and said Moscow was only aiming for good optics as four of the six corridors would lead to Russia or Belarus.
- The evacuation of Indian students stranded in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy was also delayed because of Ukraine’s dismissal of the Russian proposal to let residents flee. Russian troops have kept up shelling of evacuation corridors, where civilians are trying to escape.
- As Russia and Ukraine reported little progress from a third round of talks, foreign ministers of both the countries agreed to meet in Turkey on March 10, reports said.
- Fears are increasing over the fate of thousands of people in Ukraine who are trapped in cities without food and water.
- The Russian invasion also caused the price of Brent crude oil to touch $129 (Rs 9,912.04) per barrel. Indian equity markets were affected during intra-day trading, with Sensex dropping by more than 1,000 points.