By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The number of people who have fled Russia’s war in Ukraine has now surpassed 5.5 million, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
Nearly 5.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of Russia’s war on February 24.
Most have entered countries on Ukraine’s western border: more than 3 million people have fled to Poland, while more than 817,000 others have fled to Romania and around 520,000 have crossed into Hungary, UNHCR statistics show.
For some Ukrainian volunteers, their Saturday evening ritual is to join a weekly demonstration at the Russian Embassy in Bucharest along with Ukrainian residents and Romanians.
Station volunteers in Bucharest say they are now seeing an increasing number of arrivals from Odesa following Russian missile attacks on the southern Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea.
Meanwhile Mariupol’s city council says buses seeking to evacuate more civilians have not yet reached an agreed collection point, contradicting an earlier report.
The city council urged the evacuees to remain in place. It was not immediately clear what had caused the delay.
Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor, had earlier said the buses had left Mariupol. But he later put out a message that also confirmed the hitch in the planned evacuation.
The civilians awaiting evacuation are not from the Azovstal steelworks, the last stronghold of Ukrainian fighters resisting Russia’s siege. The UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (IRCR) has organised convoys to get people out from the sprawling Soviet-era site.
A first group of evacuees from the site was due to arrive in Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-held city northwest of Mariupol, on Monday morning after leaving the facility on Sunday.
Andryushchenko, the aide to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russian forces had resumed shelling the steelworks on Sunday as soon as the convoy of evacuees had left the plant.
Source: Fullview and News Agencies.