Russia declares ceasefire in 2 cities to allow evacuation

Lviv: Russian defense officials announced a a temporary cease-fire in two Ukrainian cities to allow civilians to evacuate, but a local official reported that shelling continued in his area Saturday despite the deal, a sign of the fragility of efforts to stop fighting across the country.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement it had agreed on evacuation routes with Ukrainian forces for the strategic port of Mariupol in the southeast and the eastern city of Volnovakha, which would be the first breakthrough in allowing people to escape the war .

The vaguely worded statement did not make clear how long the routes would remain open. Mariupol had become the scene of growing misery amid days of shelling that knocked out power and most phone service and raised the prospect of food and water shortages for hundreds of thousands of people in freezing weather.

Pharmacies are out of medicine, Doctors Without Borders said. A top official there said the cease-fire there was to last until 4 p.m. (2 p.m. GMT) and an evacuation was beginning at 11 a.m. (9 a.m. GMT.) Pavlo Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk military-civil administration that includes Mariupol, said the humanitarian corridor would extend from the city to Zaporizhzhia, about 226 kilometers (140 miles) away.

But Mariupol deputy mayor Serhiy Orlov later told the BBC that the Russians “continue to use hard artillery and rockets to bomb Mariupol. That’s why people are very scared, but anyway they go to three specific points from which we will go to evacuate them by municipal buses.” The head of Ukraine’s security council, Oleksiy Danilov, had urged Russia to create humanitarian corridors to allow children, women and the older adults to flee the fighting, calling them “question No. 1.”

Diplomatic efforts continued as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Poland to meet with the prime minister and foreign minister, a day after attending a NATO meeting in Brussels in which the alliance pledged to step up support for eastern flank members. Blinken would visit a border post to meet refugees later in the day.

As Russian forces batter strategic locations elsewhere, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has lashed out at NATO for refusing to impose a no-fly zone over his country, warning that “all the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you.” NATO said a no-fly zone could provoke widespread war in Europe with nucleararmed Russia.

But as the United States and other NATO members send weapons for Kyiv and more than 1 million refugees spill through the continent, the conflict is already drawing in countries far beyond Ukraine’s borders. —AP