Thousands of residents of the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy were evacuated after a night of Russian aerial bombardments killed 21 people as Western countries toughened their punitive measures against Moscow, including a U.S. ban on oil imports.
But continued shelling prevented a planned evacuation of the port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, where food and water were in very short supply after a week of Russian encirclement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a rousing address to the British parliament, borrowed from wartime leader Winston Churchill in vowing his country would fight on in all circumstances. He renewed his appeal for more Western help, notably a “no fly zone” which Western countries have already ruled out.
In Moscow, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi joined the long list of Western companies halting their activity in Russia. Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, acting to mitigate the effects of Western sanctions, introduced a package of measures aimed at helping Russians on low incomes.
U.N. and other officials said some 2 million people — including at least 800,000 children — had already crossed borders to other European states to avoid the war.
In Sumy, near the Russian border, an agreement was reached on an evacuation corridor and some 5,000 people were able to leave –taken by bus to Poltava in central Ukraine, officials said.
Pictures from the city showed an industrial site in ruins and bodies lying in streets piled with rubble – 21 people were killed, including several children. Officials said bombs had been dropped on apartment buildings.
The Ukrainian military was helping hundreds of people escape from the town of Irpin, just outside the capital Kyiv, after several days of intense Russian shelling.
But some 200,000 people remained trapped in Mariupol, where Ukrainian officials said Russia had for four days running violated a cease-fire agreement, negotiated to allow residents to leave. The city is viewed as strategically important in Russian plans to create a link between the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014 and two areas in eastern Ukraine run since that time by separatists after Russia fomented an uprising in the two areas.
Pictures also showed widespread damage from attacks on Mykolayiv, a major city on the route to the Black Sea port of Odesa, also considered a strategic prize for the Russian attackers.
At the heart of invasion, preceded by weeks of mass military buildup on the border, is Putin’s contention that Ukraine’s leadership is dominated by Nazis since a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president was ousted by mass protests in 2014 – the trigger for the annexation of Crimea and staged revolt in eastern Ukraine.
And the Kremlin leader has complained that the West has disregarded Moscow’s security guarantees – including an undertaking that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO.
Reducing dependence on Russian hydrocarbons
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden announced a ban on the import of Russian oil, the latest in a series of measures aimed at crippling the Russian war effort.
“The American people will deal another powerful blow to Putin’s war machine,” he said at the White House. “Americans have rallied to support the Ukrainian people and made it clear we will not be part of subsidising Putin’s war.”
The effect would be limited in any event as Russia accounts for no more than 10 percent of U.S. energy resources, far less than the figures for European imports of Russian oil and gas.
Britain announced it would phase out Russian oil imports from the end of the year. European Union leaders may agree at a summit this week to phase out the bloc’s dependency on imports of Russian fossil fuels, without a fixed date.
The EU depends on Russia for some 40 percent of its gas and considerable debate has focused on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline due to take Russian gas to Germany and beyond – the pipeline’s certification process was halted after Russia invaded its neighbour on 24th February.
Zelensky, Shakespeare and Churchill
Zelensky was acclaimed in unprecedented terms with a standing ovation in Britain’s parliament.
“The question for us now is to be or not to be,” Zelensky said in his address over a video link, evoking Shakespeare. “I can give you a definitive answer: It’s definitely to be.”
And the Ukrainian leader also paraphrased Churchill’s 1940 address to Britons facing the Nazi onslaught: “We will continue fighting for our land, whatever the cost. We will fight in the forests, on the shores, in the streets.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reiterated that British humanitarian aid and military support and sanctions would continue “until Ukraine is free”.
But he made no reference to Zelensky’s latest call for a “no fly zone” – rejected by NATO as too dangerous inasmuch as it would necessarily involve direct engagement with Russian aircraft. Moscow has already warned Western countries that any such measure would be viewed as a declaration of war.
Zelensky later expressed his frustration in his daily videos aimed at bolstering morale, saying it had now been 13 days since “we’ve been told we’ll be helped in the air, that there will be planes, that they will be delivered to us”.
And a U.S.-backed plan to provide Ukraine with Soviet-era warplanes now being held by Poland appeared to hit a new snag, when Washington rejected a surprise proposal by Warsaw that the MiG-29s first be delivered to a U.S. base in Germany and from there to Ukraine.
The Pentagon said the Polish proposal was untenable.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Poland’s declaration that it intended to deliver the 28 jets to the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany raised the prospect of warplanes departing from a U.S. and NATO base to fly into airspace contested with Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
“We will continue to consult with Poland and our other NATO allies about this issue and the difficult logistical challenges it presents, but we do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one,” Kirby said in a statement.
In Moscow, McDonald’s announced that it was closing its more than 750 restaurants in Russia but would keep paying its 62,000 employees.
“Our values mean we cannot ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine,” McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kempczinski said in an open letter to employees.
Starbucks made a similar announcement, closing its 130 Russian stores, while paying its 32,000 employees.
Coca-Cola Co. announced it was suspending its business in Russia, but offered few details. PepsiCo and General Electric have both announced partial shutdowns of their Russian business.
Since the invasion was launched, the rouble has sunk below 100 to the U.S. dollar. Russian stock markets have reopened after being closed all last week.