Humanitarian crisis mounts as Ukrainians flee 'terrifying reality of violence'
CBC
The latest:
More than one million people have fled Ukraine following Russia's invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Russian forces continued their push for control of key cities.
"Hour by hour, minute by minute, more people are fleeing the terrifying reality of violence," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement. "Countless have been displaced inside the country."
Grandi said that unless there's an immediate end to the fighting, millions more will likely flee Ukraine.
"It's been so fast and so shocking," Danny Glenwright, head of charitable organization Save The Children Canada, said of the mass movement of Ukrainians out of the country.
"Imagine, one day you've got your kids in school and there's structure in their lives," he said. "The next day, they wake up and they have to flee with really very little, over long distances in freezing conditions."
UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, has said that within Ukraine 7.5 million children are at "heightened risk" as the conflict escalates.
In a statement earlier this week, UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said that access issues on the ground and "rapidly changing front lines" have made it difficult to deliver critical supplies and services.
The mass evacuation could be seen in Kharkiv, a city of about 1.5 million people where residents desperate to escape falling shells and bombs crowded the city's train station and pressed onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.
With a column of tanks and other vehicles apparently stalled for days outside the capital of Kyiv, fighting continued on multiple fronts across Ukraine.
A second round of talks aimed at ending the fighting could come later Thursday in neighbouring Belarus — though the two sides appeared to have little common ground.
"We are ready to conduct talks, but we will continue the operation because we won't allow Ukraine to preserve a military infrastructure that threatens Russia," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, noting that they would let Ukrainians choose what government they should have.
Lavrov said that the West has continuously armed Ukraine, trained its troops and built up bases there to turn Ukraine into a bulwark against Russia — repeating Russian claims it has used to justify its operation in Ukraine.
The United States and its allies have insisted that NATO is a defensive alliance that doesn't pose a threat to Russia. And the West fears Russia's invasion is meant to overthrow Ukraine's government and install a friendly one.
Israel ordered new evacuations in Gaza's southern city of Rafah on Saturday, forcing tens of thousands more people to move as it prepares to expand its military operation closer to the heavily populated central area, in defiance of growing pressure amid the war from close ally the United States and others.