Russian forces have advanced closer to Ukraine capital Kyiv from the north, west and northeast. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Russia was sending new forces after suffering what he said were its biggest losses in decades.
Around 13,000 people were evacuated from a number of Ukrainian cities on Saturday, the deputy prime minister said, almost twice the number who managed to get out on Friday.
The governors of Kyiv and Donetsk regions said Russian attacks were continuing in areas where Ukraine was trying to evacuate people and bring aid through humanitarian corridors.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Russian shelling from heavy artillery has damaged a cancer hospital and several residential buildings in the southern city of Mykolaiv. The hospital’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said the assault damaged the building and blew out windows but no one was killed.
Ukrainian and Western officials earlier accused Russia of shelling a maternity hospital in the southern city of Mariupol on Wednesday. Three people died in that attack.
Mariupol’s mayor’s office said in a statement that there is a humanitarian catastrophe in the city and the dead aren’t even being buried, and called for Russian forces to lift the siege.
Meanwhile, the U.N. nuclear agency said, Ukraine informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that technicians have started repairing damaged power lines at the decommissioned Chernobyl power plant in an effort to restore power supplies.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian authorities said that Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, was knocked off the power grid, with emergency generators supplying backup power.