Ukraine will on Wednesday try to ensure civilians can evacuate the country through six "humanitarian corridors", including from the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
She said the corridors that would open would go from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia; Enerhodar to Zaporizhzhia; Sumy to Poltava; Izyum to Lozova; Volnovakha to Pokrovsk; and from severaltowns around Kyiv which she identified as Vorzel, Borodyanka, Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel to the capital.
"I appeal to the Russian Federation: You have undertaken official public commitments to cease fire from 9am to 9pm. We have had negative experiences when the commitments that were undertaken did not work," Ms Vereshchuk said.
She was referring to several failed attempts to open safe corridors for trapped civilians in the past few days. Each side blamed the other for their failure.
Meanwhile, an air alert was declared on Wednesday morning in and around Kyiv, with residents urged to get to bomb shelters as quickly as possible.
Ukraine's general staff said in a statement that it was building up defences in cities in the north, south and east and that forces around Kyiv were resisting the Russian offensive with unspecified strikes and "holding the line."
Evacuations from Sumy to continue for second day
Five thousand people rode buses out of the north-eastern city of Sumy on Tuesday after Moscow and Kyiv agreed on a humanitarian corridor — where a 13-hour ceasefire was to take place.
The Russian military gave a different number, saying 723 people were evacuated from the city and identifying them as mostly citizens of India, with the rest from China, Jordan and Tunisia.
It made no mention of Ukrainians among the evacuees.
The fighting around Sumy, which is close to Ukraine's northern border with Russia, has been intense since the conflict began.
The same corridor will continue to function on Wednesday, regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytskyy has said.
But just hours after some people safely evacuated Sumy, its local administrator said the city suffered "a terrible night" of air strikes that killed 22 people.
Mr Zhyvytskyy said a single large bomb destroyed six houses and damaged another two dozen houses.
He said three children's bodies, all from the same family, were pulled from the rubble. Nine of the 22 deaths were from one house.
Bombs also struck the nearby village of Bytytsya, killing another resident, he said.
Mr Zhyvytskyy's claims cannot be verified independently, though some of the photos he shared were of the areas he described.
A 'catastrophic situation' in Mariupol
The city of Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian soldiers for days and a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the encircled city of 430,000.
Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister said a humanitarian corridor would operate in Mariupol on Wednesday.
But Mariupol's previously planned evacuation reportedly failed because Russian troops fired on a Ukrainian convoy carrying humanitarian cargo to the city that was later going to ferry people out, Ms Vereshchuk had said.
The Russian military has denied firing on convoys and said the Ukrainian side was blocking the evacuation effort.
Ms Vereshchuk reaffirmed that Ukraine will not accept Moscow's offer to establish safe corridors for civilians to head toward Russia, saying it will only agree to safe exits leading westward.
She said the city was in a "catastrophic situation", cut off from water, power and communications, adding that a child in Mariupol had died of dehydration.
Theft has become widespread for food, clothes, even furniture, with locals referring to the practice as "getting a discount".
Some residents are reduced to scooping water from streams.
With the electricity out, many people are relying on their car radios for information, picking up news from stations broadcast from areas controlled by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists.
Natalia Mudrenko, an official with Ukraine's UN mission, accused Russia of effectively holding civilians "hostage" and said that "the critical situation" in Mariupol and other cities demands immediate action by world leaders and humanitarian and medical organisations.
She told a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday afternoon that civilians, mostly women and children, "are not allowed to leave and the humanitarian aid is not let in."
Authorities in Mariupol planned to start digging mass graves for all the dead, though the number is unclear.
AP/Reuters/ABC
