Thomson ReutersInternally displaced people from Mariupol and nearby towns arrive in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Friday.Some of the passengers had to stand throughout the 12-hour journey, via the Russian-controlled port of Berdyansk, due to the high number of people trying to escape Russia's siege.
Women and children disembark as a convoy of buses carrying evacuees from Mariupol and Melitopol arrive at the registration centre in Zaporizhzhia late Friday. A second Red Cross convoy is heading to Mariupol in another attempt to try to rescue civilians from the besieged port as Russian forces looked to be regrouping for new attacks in the southeast.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces were leaving behind "a complete disaster" as they retreat from the north, including towns just outside Kyiv, and he warned residents to beware of more Russian shelling and of landmines.
"Rockets are still landing and smack in the middle of the city, and the places that they have left, they have mined," Zalmayev said. Moscow says the action it launched on Feb. 24 is a "special military operation" designed not to occupy territory but to demilitarize and "denazify" its neighbour. Francis has already rejected that terminology, calling it a war.
"However, the icy winds of war, which bring only death, destruction and hatred in their wake, have swept down powerfully upon the lives of many people and affected us all," he said."Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that, will either be shared, or not be at all," he said.
The mines have been there for years! STOP GASLIGHTING people! Eastern Ukraine one of the areas most contaminated by landmines in the world