GENEVA (Reuters) – The Red Cross is hoping to organise the evacuation of two convoys of some 30 buses with civilians out of the besieged northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy and their passage to a safe area, a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Ewan Watson, spokesperson of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told a U.N. briefing in Geneva that the operation would be carried out with the Ukrainian Red Cross but was not underway yet. He noted there had been delays with similar evacuations from Mariupol, where he said people are “essentially being suffocated in this city now with no aid’.
Some 2.95 million Ukrainians have fled their homeland since Russian forces invaded 20 days ago, including 1.8 million in Poland, U.N. refugee agency spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh said. Some 300,000 have gone on to Western Europe, he said.
They include 1.4 million children, meaning 73,000 children have become refugees on average each day over the last 20 days or 55 children every minute or almost one per second, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder told the same briefing.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Catherine Evans)
