Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, the Head of Sumy Military Administration, announced that during the evacuation of civilians there was shooting on the outskirts of the city, although the buses were not being shot at and the ‘humanitarian corridor’ to leave Sumy is operational.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, Iryna Vereshchuk, says the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is supposed to help secure humanitarian corridors, is not fulfilling its main purpose for fear of Russia.
Russian aggressors say they are ready to open humanitarian corridors to evacuate the population of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Sumy and Chernihiv at 10:00 a.m. on March 8.
The attempt to organise a humanitarian corridor out of Russian-occupied Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel has resulted in the evacuation of some 2,000 people, but more than 4,000 still need to be evacuated from the outskirts of the capital.
Ukraine called the "evacuation" of people to Russia and Belarus proposed by the aggressor state unacceptable and demanded that they support evacuation routes from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhia to the western regions of Ukraine.
Cities, towns, and villages in the Sumy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mykolayiv, Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions are in the most need of access to humanitarian corridors.
The Ukrainian government is negotiating the evacuation of civilians from Hostomel and Bucha in the Kyiv region, two cities that remain under the relentless fire of the Russian troops.
Russian troops have broken the ceasefire and shelled the "green corridor" established on 5 March for the evacuation of residents from the besieged Mariupol.