Air raid sirens sounded again in cities across Ukraine on Wednesday as fresh efforts to evacuate civilians were overshadowed by new reports of “mass murder” from the Russian bombardment.
Ukrainian media said the alerts warning about potential new attacks were sounded in Chernihiv — the site of a failed evacuation attempt earlier this week — Luby, Vasylkiv and Kyiv.
They also reported sirens in Poltava, which on Tuesday saw the arrival of 5,000 citizens fleeing from the encircled city of Sumy after the first successful operation of a humanitarian corridor.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said two other major cities, Kharkiv and Mariupol, were still facing heavy shelling and continued to be surrounded by Russian troops.
It came as the regional governor of Sumy Dmytro Zhyvytsky announced that 22 people, including three children, had been killed in the city during overnight shelling on Monday. He said the deaths amounted to “mass murder” and were the result of Russian bombs unleashed into a residential area.
“Three bombs in one evening... It was a terrible night,” he told the BBC, adding that nine people in one house were killed. Around 20 houses were partially damaged and another six destroyed completely.
Photographs of a young mother and her two children all killed during Russian shelling of a supposed escape route from the city of Irpin also emerged on Wednesday in the latest evidence of the human tragedy being caused by the invasion.
Colleagues described Tatyana Perebeynos, the head of accounting at an IT start-up, as “bright, witty, determined” as they paid tribute to her and her daughter Alise, nine, and son Nikita, 18, who were left sprawled by the roadside after being hit by Russian shelling as they tried to flee at the weekend.
Ms Perebeynos and her children had previously fled from the Donetsk region to escape the conflict there triggered there in 2014 by Russian separatists backed by Vladimir Putin.
Ukrainian reports also revealed that Pasha Lee, an actor and TV presenter who did the voiceover for Ukrainian version of The Hobbit, has been killed. He signed up for his country’s territorial defence forces in the early days of the conflict and lost his life fighting Russian forces during the bombardment of Irpin.
The head of the TV channel he appeared on described him as “the most cheerful and sunny” of presenters.
News of the deaths, and the many others that have occurred since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago, came as fresh efforts to evacuate civilians got under way.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said humanitarian corridors would be attempted along six routes — including out of Mariupol, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv — and that Russia had agreed to stop firing for 12 hours ending at 7pm UK time on Wednesday.
Previous attempts to allow residents to flee have collapsed because of continuing Russian shelling, while another failed to get under way because the only routes offered led to Belarus or Russia.
But the safe escape of around 5,000 people yesterday on a humanitarian corridor from Sumy to Poltava raised hopes that today’s attempts could prove more successful.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International said its analysis had concluded that a Russian airstrike that reportedly killed 47 civilians in a bread queue in Chernihiv last week was probably carried out using unguided “dumb bombs” and should be investigated as a potential war crime.
