Red Cross hopes to evacuate civilians from besieged Sumy, Ukraine

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) -The Red Cross is organising the evacuation of two convoys of more than 70 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 for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that the buses were ready but he had no information yet on their destination.

“People have assembled, we hope it will go ahead as planned,” Watson told Reuters in Geneva. “We are hoping at the very least to start this operation today.”

Earlier, he told a U.N. briefing that the operation would be carried out with the Ukrainian Red Cross.

“We’ve seen humanitarian corridors are promised and not respected,” he said. “That is really up to the parties to the conflict to agree on the terms of a safe passage agreement and then stick to it.”

Watson noted there had been delays with a similar evacuation from the southeastern city of Mariupol.

“But the bottom line here is that hundreds of thousands of people remain without aid today. They are unable to leave the city (Mariupol) today and they are essentially being suffocated in this city right now with no aid.”

Some 3 million Ukrainians have fled their homeland since Russian forces invaded 20 days ago, Paul Dillon of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.

They include 1.8 million Ukrainians now in Poland, according to U.N. refugee agency spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh, adding that 300,000 have gone on to Western Europe.

Among them are 1.4 million children, meaning 73,000 children have become refugees on average each day since the invasion – almost one per second, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said.

“Ukrainian children arriving in neighbouring countries are at significant risk of family separation, violence, sexual exploitation, and trafficking,” Elder said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Bill Berkrot)