Russian Army attackswhich for the first time this Friday spread to populations in the west of the country, close to the borders with the European Union, continue this saturday when the Ukrainian authorities have announced the number of children killed in the war, which now totals 79, and the diplomatic path to reaching a ceasefire continues to be blocked.
The bombardments on this seventeenth day of war continue on installations and populations in western Ukraine, in actions such as the one has completely destroyed in the last few hours the military airfield in Lutskclose to the border with Poland.
military installation was hit by four Russian missiles this Friday and this Saturday it has been confirmed that it is totally inoperativesaid the mayor of Lutsk, Ihor Polishchuk, according to the Ukrainian agency Ukrinform.
In addition to Lutsk also suffered attacks Ivano-Frankivsk, about 250 kilometers further south and close to Moldovaand sirens were heard several times in Lviv, a city also close to Poland that had not suffered attacks so far and a transit point for Ukrainians seeking to flee and go to Polish territory.
The attacks have also set fire to this Saturday an oil terminal in the city of Vasilkivin the Kiev region, while other cities remain with water and electricity supply cuts, according to local authorities.
“An oil depot is on fire in Vasilkiv after an airstrike. In the village of Kriachky, the (Russian) occupier fired on the oil depot at night,” said Oleksiy Kuleba, head of the Kiev Regional State Administration. , in your Telegram account.
According to the Ukrainian agency Ukrinform, “earlier, a frozen goods warehouse caught fire in the village of Kvitneve, Brovary districtalso in the Kiev region, after an enemy shelling”.
Chernigov, north of the capital, is also under attack by the Russians and remains without water supply, electricity, nor do its citizens have access to gas that could power heating systems.
Ukrainians break the bloc to Mariupol
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, in the port city of Mariupol, the Russians have bombed the mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificentreported the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on its website.
“More than 80 adults and children are hiding there from the bombingincluding citizens of Turkey,” added the ministry, which did not provide further information on the event.
Mariúpol, a city of some 500,000 inhabitants in southeastern Ukraine and on the shores of the inland Sea of Azov, is an important industrial center that has suffered from a Russian siege since the beginning of the conflict.
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian authorities have managed to open a humanitarian corridor to bring food and medicine.
“Green corridor open. A humanitarian caravan left Zaporizhia for Mariupol,” announces the city council in its Telegram account. “More than 90 tons of food and medicine go to the city, which has been blocked for 11 days,” say the local authorities.
Ukraine agreed with Russia to open several humanitarian corridors to evacuate citizens and provide food to the attacked cities in Ukraine.
However, most of them have not worked as expected and both sides blame each other for their blockade. In fact, the Ukrainians today speak of the opening of up to a dozen of them whose operation has not been confirmed by either side.
Children victims of the bombings
At least 79 children have died and a hundred have been injured since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops began on February 24, according to a report published this Saturday by the Ukrainian Children’s Prosecutor’s Office on its Telegram account.
Most of the deaths included in this report, whose data cannot be verified by an independent source, have occurred in Russian attacks against the country’s main cities.
“During the 16 days of war in Ukraine, 79 children have already died and almost 100 have been injured. Most of the victims were in the Kiev, Kharkov, Donetsk, Sumy, Kherson and Zhytomyr regions,” the report said.
So far, more than 280 educational institutions have been destroyed, 9 of them completely.
Exodus under the bombs
The number of Ukrainians who have fled their country as a result of the war with Russia rose today to 2.59 million, according to figures updated daily by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which seem to indicate a certain momentary decrease in this exodus
It is the first day since the first days of the Russian offensive in which the daily increase in refugees does not exceed 100,000 people, according to UNHCR statistics.
Related news
The exodus of Ukrainian refugees is the largest in Europe since the Second World War, even surpassing those caused by all the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s (2.4 million according to calculations by organizations humanitarian).
In the midst of this situation in recent hours there has been no diplomatic rapprochement after the interviews of the foreign ministers of both countries in Turkish territory last Thursday.