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Air raid sirens repeatedly blared over Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, on Wednesday, as officials in the “apocalyptic” city of Mariupol planned to dig mass graves to clear corpses from the streets.
The back-to-back emergency alerts in the capital sent residents to bomb shelters even as invading Russian forces promised a cease-fire to allow evacuations from six key areas, including two Kyiv suburbs.
But as of Thursday, only one of those planned corridors out appeared to have worked, with Ukrainian authorities saying 5,000 civilians, including 1,700 foreign students, managed to escape from Sumy.
NATO and Ukraine’s government instead said that Russia had shelled some of those promised “humanitarian corridors” in the Kremlin’s latest war crimes.
The sirens left Kyiv on edge Wednesday — as the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) predicted Russia was preparing a full-on “assault on Kyiv in the coming days.”
“Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, east,” the think tank wrote in a report Tuesday.
“They have made limited but notable gains in Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts and continued to concentrate forces for an attack into the city,” the think tank said, predicting Tuesday that the capital would be attacked “in the coming 24-96 hours.”
However, they may be slowed by colder than usual temperatures that former British Army official Kevin Price told the Times of London would leave Russian troops sitting in a “iron freezer all night.”
While Kyiv remained Russia’s main target, the greatest alarm has been sounded over Mariupol — a southern port so devastated that the Red Cross has described it as “apocalyptic.”
Local officials confirmed that they planned to dig mass graves amid distressing reports of corpses left on the streets.
One 6-year-old girl died of dehydration after being trapped in the rubble of an airstrike that blew away her mom, officials had said Tuesday.
Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian soldiers for days and a humanitarian crisis is unfolding for the 430,000 residents, with hungry people breaking into stores in search of food and melting snow for water.
“Why shouldn’t I cry?” one resident, Goma Janna, asked as she wept by the light of an oil lamp in one of the basement shelters where thousands huddle.
“I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children.”
An attempt to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine through a designated safe corridor failed, with Ukrainian officials saying Russian forces had fired on the convoy before it reached the city.
Natalia Mudrenko, a senior member of Ukraine’s UN Mission, told the Security Council that the people of Mariupol have “been effectively taken hostage” by the siege.
Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Mariupol is in a “catastrophic situation.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Wednesday accused the Russians of essentially holding 400,000 people in the city “hostage” by blocking evacuation.
“Indiscriminate shelling continues. Almost 3.000 newborn babies lack medicine and food,” he wrote on Twitter. “I urge the world to act! Force Russia to stop its barbaric war on civilians and babies!”
The city is one of those supposed to be protected by a cease-fire Wednesday to finally allow a safe exit.
Along with several towns around Kyiv, other areas hoping for safe evacuations Wednesday include Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east and Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, in the northeast.
“We have a short window of time at the moment,” said former culture minister Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces.
“Even if there is a cease-fire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.”
With Post wires
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