Russia claimed it will allow civilians to escape areas of fighting, but the so-called humanitarian corridors offered lead only to Russian-controlled territory.
Six humanitarian corridors for refugees are being opened by Russia to allow, they say, civilians to flee the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The fact that very few have chosen to use them so far has been blamed on Ukrainian “nationalists were obstructing evacuation”, the Kremlin claimed on Monday.
The Ukrainian government has protested the measure as cynical and insincere, pointing out so-called escape routes either lead into Russia and Belarus — de-facto Russian territory at this stage — or into other besieged cities. A spokesman for the president called the corridors “immoral.”
That Russia would attempt to force civilians uprooted by a war it created to seek ‘safety’ inside Russia has been lambasted as “moral cynicism” by France’s Emmanuel Macron.
“This is a completely immoral story,” The Guardian reports one spokesman for the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as saying regarding Moscow’s evacuation plan. “People’s suffering is used to create the desired television picture.”
In the conflict so far, the overwhelming majority of civilian refugees have headed West into the European Union, rather than East into the Russian Federation.
Previous attempts at getting civilians out of embattled Ukrainian cities have largely fallen through, with Russia repeatedly being accused by Ukraine of breaking ceasefire agreements. Russia, for its part, blames Ukraine back.
"No [NATO] ally has sent combat troops to Ukraine. We have no hostility toward the Russian people, and we have no desire to impugn a great nation and a world power,” Johnson claimed https://t.co/8m8vOGdGnd
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 7, 2022
Since the advent of open hostilities between Russia and Ukraine this year, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have flooded out of their embattled nation in the hopes of finding safety.
Over one million have crossed into Poland alone, with the UN estimating on Sunday that a total of 1.5 million refugees have left the country since the conflict began.
“This is now the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II,” wrote the UNHCR on social media in regards to the mass exodus. “In the coming days millions more lives will be uprooted, unless there is an immediate end to this senseless conflict.”
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