Kyiv accuses Russia of destroying fuel and food storage depots in Ukraine

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Russia has started destroying Ukraine’s fuel and food storage depots and bringing troops on rotation to the countries’ shared border, an advisor to Ukraine’s interior ministry said Sunday. Kyiv has asked the International Committee of the Red Cross not to open a planned office in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, saying it would legitimise Moscow’s ‘deportation’ of Ukrainians. Follow all the developments in Ukraine on our live blog. All times in Paris time [GMT + 1].

10:32 am: 30,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived in France

Some 30,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived in France, with half of them travelling through the country to other places such as Spain, French Housing Minister Emmanuelle Wargon said Sunday.

Wargon told Franceinfo radio the government was preparing to welcome 100,000 people fleeing the war in Ukraine. 

France has been granting temporary European Union stay permits to the refugees, which allows them to have access to schools and to work in the country.

10:07 am: ‘Mom, war [has] started’: Ukrainian parent describes flight to Poland with her family

Ukrainian professor Zakhida Adylova left the city of Lviv in western Ukraine with her 75-year-old mother and 11-year-old daughter for Poland. It was not the first time she and her daughter had left home because of war: They fled Crimea in 2014 after the arrival of Russian forces.

8:44 am: Ukraine and Russia agree two civilian evacuation corridors

Ukraine and Russia have agreed two corridors to evacuate civilians from frontline areas on Sunday, including allowing people to leave by private car from the southern city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

8:38 am: Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces continued northwest of Kyiv

Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces continued in the northwest suburbs of Kyiv on Saturday, and Ukraine’s military command said Russian forces were “grouping together” southwest of the capital. FRANCE 24’s Gulliver Cragg reports.

8:19 am: Russia destroying fuel and food storage depots, Ukrainian interior ministry advisor says

Russia has started destroying Ukrainian fuel and food storage depots, meaning the government will have to disperse the stocks of both in the near future, Ukrainian interior ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said on Sunday.

Speaking on local television, Denysenko also said Russia was bringing forces to the Ukrainian border on rotation, and could make new attempts to advance in its invasion of Ukraine.

8:18 am: Ukraine asks Red Cross not to open office in Russia near border

Ukraine has asked the International Committee of the Red Cross not to open a planned office in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, saying it would legitimise Moscow’s “humanitarian corridors” and the abduction and forced deportation of Ukrainians.

The head of the ICRC said on Thursday after his talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian armies was needed before civilians could be evacuated properly from war-torn Ukraine. 

Russian media reported that Red Cross chief Peter Maurer asked Russia to facilitate the opening of a Red Cross office in Rostov-on-Don.

Mykhailo Radutskyi, chairman of the public health committee in Ukraine’s parliament, appealed to the Red Cross to change its plans.

“The Committee calls on the International Committee of the Red Cross that it would not legitimise ‘humanitarian corridors’ on the territory of the Russian Federation as well as that it would not support the abduction of Ukrainians and its forced deportation,” Radutskyi said in a statement.

Rostov-on-Don is the largest Russian city on Ukraine’s eastern border and administrative capital of the Rostov region, and it has been used by Russia for temporary accommodation camps for people transported out of the war zone.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and REUTERS)