Russian forces have been accused of taking hostage the people of the besieged Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, as desperate local officials imposed drinking water rationing on trapped civilians.
About 150,000 people are stuck in the northern city with little hope of aid after Russia cut them off from the capital, Kyiv, 100 miles south, by bombing a road bridge across the Desna River.
Chernihiv, which has been the focus of intense fighting in which tens of people have been killed a day, has already been without power for days, with looting rife, as the city has collapsed into chaos.
Officials said they were now running out of drinkable water, in a grim forewarning of a humanitarian disaster to match that of the flattened port of Mariupol, in the south-east of the country, from where 100,000 people are struggling to flee.
“The number of tanks for drinking water is limited,” Chernihiv officials said in a warning to civilians on Wednesday. “Due to this, in order to protect the population of the city, starting from [Thursday] restrictions are imposed on the distribution of drinking water. Water will be poured in the amount of 10 litres per person.”
Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, claimed that the population was being held hostage, with the Ukrainian government fearful that the Kremlin is seeking to push its “maximalist” demands in the current peace negotiations with Kyiv by ratcheting up the targeting of civilians.
Denisova said: “Today Chernihiv remains completely cut off from the capital. The occupiers bombed the bridge across the River Desna, through which we transported humanitarian aid to the city and evacuated civilians.
“The city has no electricity, water, heat and almost no gas, infrastructure is destroyed. According to local residents, the occupiers are compiling lists of civilians for the ‘evacuation’ to Lgov [in the Kursk region of Russia]. The racists, cutting off Chernihiv from the capital, turned its inhabitants into hostages.”
Chernihiv’s mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, said Russia was targeting its fire at the city’s hospitals in an echo of the attritional warfare being conducted elsewhere.
He said: “Is a hospital a military infrastructure facility too? It is important to understand what methods are used by Russia when conducting hostilities in Chernihiv. Their tactic is to intentionally destroy civilians and infrastructure facilities. It has nothing to do with the targeted fire on military infrastructure facilities.”
Atroshenko told the Ukrainian news website Censor.net there were now 40 funerals a day in Chernihiv, up from eight, as a result of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling. This was despite half of the peacetime population having fled.
He said: “We have two base hospitals in the city with about 200 wounded in each of them. We bury about 40 people per day. Prior to the war, we buried an average of eight people per day. According to my estimates, about 50% of local residents left the city. Another 50% are staying, but unfortunately many people among those who are staying cannot take care of themselves.”
Arriving at the Polish city of Przemysl close to the Ukrainian border, refugees from Chernihiv spoke of schools being destroyed and people queueing for bread being blown away by bombs.
Kateryna Mytkevich, 39, whose son could not leave because he is of fighting age, said: “Two schools in the city centre were blown up; there were small children there. It’s so difficult. I don’t understand why we have such a curse.
“I had to flee because everything was destroyed. There was no gas, no electricity, no water in the city. Our children are dying. My son had to stay in Chernihiv; I could only take my daughter with me. It hurts a lot. Now we have nowhere to go, our whole neighbourhood is destroyed. Everything is completely destroyed.”
Volodymr Fedorovych, 77, said: “There was nothing, there wasn’t even bread. Bread was brought in every three days. One day I was standing in line for bread but then decided to go and get some tea. I had just walked away when they dropped the bomb [on people in the queue]. Apparently it was a helicopter – we didn’t even hear the whistle [of the bomb falling]. Sixteen people died and 47 were taken by ambulance, some of them without arms and legs. Horrible. There were 100 people in that queue.”
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Channel 24 that Russia had begun to “apply to the city about the same tactics as in Mariupol”. Arestovych said, however, that unlike in Mariupol there remained ways to supply humanitarian aid to the city.
On Wednesday Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said agreement had been reached to try to evacuate civilians trapped in Ukrainian towns and cities through nine “humanitarian corridors”, but that no such agreement had been reached to establish a safe corridor from the heart of Mariupol.
The name of an 11-year-old gymnast was added to the growing death toll in Mariupol on Wednesday. Kateryna Dyachenko was said by her coach, Anastasia Meshchanenkova, to have died as result of the collapse of a house after a direct hit by Russian artillery.
The Pentagon said Russia was now pummelling Mariupol using artillery, long-range missiles and naval ships deployed in the nearby Sea of Azov.
Meanwhile, there are growing concerns in western Ukraine that Belarus is preparing to send its own troops into the country. On Wednesday, Alexander Lukashenko’s government told some Ukrainian diplomats to leave the country. On Tuesday the Belarusian security service, the KGB, had accused eight Ukrainian diplomats of espionage.
