LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Not a single civilian was able to leave the encircled Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Thursday as Russian forces failed to respect a temporary ceasefire to allow evacuations, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on national television.
Efforts to send food, water and medicine into the city failed when Russian tanks attacked a humanitarian corridor, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a televised address.
“This is outright terror … from experienced terrorists,” he said. “The world needs to know this. I have to admit it – we are all dealing with a terrorist state.”
Zelenskiy said Ukrainian authorities managed to evacuate almost 40,000 people on Thursday from five other cities.
Russia’s defence ministry said earlier it would declare a ceasefire on Friday and open humanitarian corridors from Mariupol as well as Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Chernihiv.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Jon Boyle and Cynthia Osterman)
