Racing for safety, Ukrainians meet new perils.
Russian forces attacked civilian areas in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as terrified residents joined an exodus of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing westward, heeding warnings by authorities that Russian troops were massing for a major assault.
On Sunday morning, two residential buildings and a school were hit in the city of Sievierodonetsk, in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, though no casualties were reported. And a barrage of Russian strikes rained down on the airport in Dnipro, a city in east-central Ukraine, wounding five Ukrainian rescue workers, a local official said.
Analysts predict Russian troops, refocusing on the east after being thwarted in the capital, will carry out a major offensive stretching from Dnipro to Izium, a city almost 150 miles northeast where fighting has already been heavy, U.S. military officials said Sunday. Satellite images showed hundreds of military vehicles moving through the town of Velykyi Burluk toward Izium on Friday.
The authorities have urged Ukrainians in the east to flee — but the road to safety, too, is fraught with peril.
On a highway near Kyiv, the capital, as many as 50 bodies of civilians who appeared to be trying to escape danger were discovered, a local mayor said Sunday.
“Some were burned,” the mayor, Taras Didych, told The New York Times. “Others had their hands tied. Others were shot in the head outside their cars.”
A tableau of horror emerged from photographs taken by Mr. Didych, the mayor of Dmytrivka, where most of the bodies were found. He said it was not clear when the killings took place, or if they had happened all at once.
But the photos revealed what appears to have been a massacre on the M06 highway, which runs west from Kyiv to the city of Zhytomyr, possibly of drivers seeking safety in Kyiv. Most of the bodies appear to have been shot and burned.
Most of the dead were found near a hotel called Babushkin Sad, or Granny’s Garden,
“I now call it the road of death,” Mr. Didych said.
Some Ukrainians in the east vowed to stay put, though at times it appeared more out of fatalism than hope. Others were looking desperately for a way out.
In the region where Kramatorsk is located, Donetsk, an estimated 1,000 volunteers have stepped forward to drive a rapidly assembled fleet of 400 buses and vans to help evacuate residents, according to one local aid group.
“We don’t have much time,” said Yugoslav Boyko, a Kramatorsk resident who heads the group, Everything Will Be Fine.
Mr. Boyko said Sunday that he had been inundated with calls from people offering assistance and that the drivers are fanning out daily to towns and villages across Donetsk to retrieve residents. The organizers have redrawn evacuation routes to keep big groups from gathering in open spaces.
“We are doing everything now to avoid mass casualties,” Mr. Boyko said.
For security reasons, passengers must contact volunteers directly to book tickets and are not given pickup locations or instructions until two hours before departure. Local officials have also been instructed not to advertise bus routes or schedules on social media too far in advance of departures.
“We could see another Mariupol here,” Mr. Boyko said, referring to the southern city that has been encircled and bombarded by Russian forces for weeks. “We are hoping that our armed forces can hold their positions, but they are outnumbered.”
Mr. Boyko, who said he lost a volunteer in the train station attack in Kramatorsk on Friday, said the number of casualties could have been much worse. Many trains had been canceled because of railway damage from a Russian missile strike the night before, he said.
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, the train and bus station continued to receive a steady stream of people fleeing their homes.
For many, realization has set in that the war will most likely last longer than they originally anticipated. Some said they had already had to relocate two or three times since they first left home.
“We thought it would last a week only,” said Tatiana, a manicurist
who said she left eastern Ukraine when Russia invaded and was waiting on a platform to board a train as an air-raid siren sounded. She declined to provide her last name.
On an underground level of the train station late at night last week, Natalia Neradenko was waiting for the all-clear siren to sound as she tried to calm her crying 4-year-old-daughter, Veronika.
“The bombing at first was far from us and then it started approaching,” said Ms. Neradenko, a cleaner from near Lysychansk, Ukraine. “I was scared for my children, so I took them and we left.”
Ms. Neradenko’s 14-year-old son, Kirill, was also with her.
“This is his second war,” she said, recalling the 2014 battles between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces. “We are going to go to Poland, and then we are going to decide what to do.”
Russian forces on Saturday prevented buses from evacuating civilians in three cities in the east, breaching an agreement brokered by the Red Cross. More than 4,000 people were evacuated Saturday through other corridors, according to the Ukrainian official in charge of corridors.
The departing residents are part of the fastest-moving exodus of European civilians since World War II, according to the United Nations. More than seven million Ukrainians have fled their homes since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24, with more than 4.5 million leaving the country altogether.
More than half went to neighboring Poland. Of those, about 90 percents are women and children, because Ukraine generally prohibits men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country.
In addition to forcing vast population shifts, the war, now in its seventh week, has also reached deep into the fertile plains of a Ukrainian region known as Europe’s breadbasket. It has paralyzed harvests, destroyed granaries, and crops, and brought potentially devastating consequences to a country that produces a large share of the world’s grain.
Ukraine has already lost at least $1.5 billion in grain exports since the war began, the country’s deputy agriculture minister said recently. And Russia, the world’s leading grain exporter, has been largely unable to export food because of international sanctions.
The combination is creating a global food crisis “beyond anything we’ve seen since World War II,” the chief of the United Nations World Food Program has warned.
Ukraine’s economy is expected to shrink by roughly 45 percent this year, the World Bank said on Sunday. Russia’s economy is already in a “deep recession” and expected to fall by 11.2 percent, the bank reported.
Despite persistent Russian attacks on civilians, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said Sunday that his country would continue to pursue peace talks with Russia. Mr. Kuleba told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that while it was “extremely difficult” to think about sitting down with people who commit “atrocities,” if doing so could help prevent even one massacre, “I have to take that opportunity.”
After withdrawing troops following a failed attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, Russia has regrouped its forces for an anticipated onslaught against the Donbas region in the east and south. Ukrainian forces there have battled Russian troops and pro-Russian separatists in two breakaway enclaves since 2014.
Western military officials say Russia’s military has suffered devastating casualties and has been crippled by poor morale and logistical failures. Britain’s latest defense intelligence update said Sunday that Moscow was attempting to bolster its military with personnel discharged up to 10 years ago, along with recruits from Transnistria, the Russian-backed separatist region of Moldova.
But Western officials have also warned that Russia’s military remains a potent threat, even as Ukraine has redeployed many of its forces away from the capital region to defend eastern and southern regions threatened by Russian forces.
On Sunday morning, the American national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the United States, which like other Western nations has accused Russia of war crimes, would provide more weapons to Ukraine.
“We’re going to get Ukraine the weapons it needs to beat back the Russians and stop them from taking more cities and towns where they commit these crimes,” Mr. Sullivan said on ABC News's “This Week.”
“Weapons are arriving every day, including today,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, expressed skepticism in remarks excerpted from an interview to be broadcast Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“I have 100 percent confidence in our people and in our armed forces,” he said, “but unfortunately I don’t have the confidence that we will be receiving everything we need.”
