FILE PHOTO: Ukrainian firefighters and servicemen work next to a digger amid the rubble of the Retroville shopping mall, a day after it was shelled by Russian forces in a residential district in the northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on March 21, 2022. – At least six people were killed in the bombing. Six bodies were laid out in front of the shopping mall, according to an AFP journalist. The building had been hit by a powerful blast that pulverized vehicles in its car park and left a crater several meters wide. (Photo by FADEL SENNA / AFP)
Kyiv, Ukraine — One person was killed and four seriously wounded when Russian forces shelled an evacuation convoy outside the northern Ukrainian city of Chernigiv, officials in Kyiv said Thursday.
“Five buses came under direct fire from the enemy as they tried to get to the surrounded city to evacuate people,” Ukraine’s ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said on Telegram.
“There were only civilian volunteers on the buses. As a result of the shelling, one person is dead, four were gravely injured.”
Denisova said Russian forces were “denying any chance of evacuating peaceful citizens from besieged Chernigiv, essentially holding tens of thousands of people hostage without food, water or heat.”
She said Russian troops were continuously shelling residential neighborhoods.
Chernigiv, a city of some 280,000 people before the war, has seen the most ferocious bombardment, second only to Mariupol in the south, which has been practically destroyed.
Chernigiv mayor Vladyslav Atroshchenko said earlier this week that the city had lost 350 people during the war, most of them civilians.
Russia promised on Tuesday to “radically” scale back fighting around Chernigiv and Kyiv, but shelling continued there.
“The enemy is moving around the territory of the region. Can we call this a withdrawal of troops? I’m not sure,” regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus said in a video address on Telegram.
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