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Ukraine Crisis | Refugee count tops one million, Russians besiege ports

Published:Thursday | March 3, 2022 | 4:21 PM
Passengers rush to board a train leaving to Slovakia from the Lviv railway station, in Lviv, west Ukraine, Wednesday, March 2, 2022. Russian forces have escalated their attacks on crowded cities in what Ukraine's leader called a blatant campaign of terror. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The number of people sent fleeing Ukraine by Russia's invasion topped one million on Wednesday, the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said, as Russian forces kept up their bombardment of the country's second-biggest city, Kharkiv, and laid siege to two strategic seaports.

The tally from the UN refugee agency released to The Associated Press amounts to more than 2% of Ukraine's population being forced out of the country in less than a week.

The mass evacuation could be seen in Kharkiv, where residents desperate to get away from falling shells and bombs crowded the city's train station and tried to press onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.

In a videotaped address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance. He vowed that the invaders would have “not one quiet moment” and described Russian soldiers as “confused children who have been used.”

Moscow's isolation deepened when most of the world lined up against it at the United Nations to demand it withdraw from Ukraine. And the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes.

With fighting going on on multiple fronts across the country, Britain's Defence Ministry said Mariupol, a large city on the Azov Sea, was encircled by Russian forces, while the status of another vital port, Kherson, a Black Sea shipbuilding city of 280,000, remained unclear.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces claimed to have taken complete control of Kherson, which would make it the biggest city to fall yet in the invasion. A senior US defence official disputed that.

“Our view is that Kherson is very much a contested city,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Zelenskyy's office told the AP that it could not comment on the situation in Kherson while the fighting was still going on.

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