Ukraine's Foreign Minister apologized Tuesday for accusing El Al airlines for refraining from imposing sanctions on Russia and continuing to accept funds via the Mir Russian payment system, the Times of Israel reported.
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"While the world sanctions Russia for its barbaric atrocities in Ukraine, some prefer to make money soaked in Ukrainian blood," Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. "Immoral and a blow to Ukrainian-Israeli relations."
El Al rejected the accusations, saying it had stopped accepting Mir on Feb. 28, four days after the incursion began. It lamented the fact that Kuleba failed to check the facts before posting his "misleading tweet" and noted that El Al airplanes have brought crucial humanitarian aid to Ukraine and also ferried refugees to Israel.
"Indeed, the 'Mir' payment button remained on the website, but the use of it was blocked," Kuleba acknowledged on Tuesday, though the system's logo did not appear on the El Al website during attempts to book flights from the United States, Israel and Russia on Monday. "I am grateful to El Al for its important humanitarian operations and convey my apologies."
Kuleba deleted his original tweet shortly after apologizing.
Meanwhile, buses packed with people fleeing the Russian invasion in Ukraine began a procession along a snowy road out of one city Tuesday, as a new effort to evacuate civilians along safe corridors finally got underway.
The Russian onslaught has forced 2 million people to flee Ukraine, UN officials said Tuesday, but has trapped others inside besieged cities that are running low on food, water and medicine amid the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.
Previous attempts to lead civilians to safety have crumbled with renewed attacks. The route people took Tuesday out of the eastern city of Sumy was one of five promised by the Russians to offer civilians a way to escape the fighting.
Video posted by the Ukrainian state communications agency showed people with bags boarding buses, but it was not clear how long the effort would last.
"The Ukrainian city of Sumy was given a green corridor, the first stage of evacuation began," the agency tweeted. Sumy is just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Russian border.
With the invasion well into its second week, Russian troops have made significant advances in southern Ukraine but stalled in some other regions. Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers fortified the capital, Kyiv, with hundreds of checkpoints and barricades designed to thwart a takeover. A steady rain of shells and rockets fell on other population centers, including the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where the mayor reported heavy artillery fire.
"We can't even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn't stop day or night," Mayor Anatol Fedoruk said. "Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. It's a nightmare."
In one of the most desperate cities, the encircled southern port of Mariupol, an estimated 200,000 people – nearly half the population of 430,000 – were hoping to flee, and Red Cross officials waited to hear when a corridor would be established.
Russia's coordination center for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk both said a cease-fire was agreed to start Tuesday morning to allow some civilians to evacuate, but the two sides differed on where they said the corridors would be.
Russia's coordination center suggested there would be more than one corridor, but that most would lead to Russia, either directly or through Belarus. At the UN, however, the Russian ambassador suggested corridors from several cities could be opened and people could choose for themselves which direction they would take.
Vereshchuk, meanwhile, only said that the two sides had agreed to an evacuation of civilians from the eastern city of Sumy, toward the Ukrainian city of Poltava. Those to be evacuated include foreign students from India and China, she said.
She reiterated that proposals to evacuate civilians to Russia and its ally Belarus, which was a launch pad for the invasion, were unacceptable.
Demands for effective passageways have surged amid intensifying shelling by Russian forces. The steady bombardments, including in some of Ukraine's most populated regions, have yielded a humanitarian crisis of diminishing food, water and medical supplies.
Through it all, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were showing unprecedented courage.
"The problem is that for one soldier of Ukraine, we have 10 Russian soldiers, and for one Ukrainian tank, we have 50 Russian tanks," Zelenskyy told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday night. But he noted that the gap in strength was closing and that even if Russian forces "come into all our cities," they will be met with an insurgency.
A top US official said multiple countries were discussing whether to provide the warplanes that Zelenskyy has been pleading for.
The besieged city of Mariupol was short on water, food and power, and cellphone networks are down. Stores have been looted as residents search for essential goods. Police moved through the city, advising people to remain in shelters until they heard official messages broadcast over loudspeakers to evacuate.
Hospitals in Mariupol are facing severe shortages of antibiotics and painkillers, and doctors performed some emergency procedures without them.
The lack of phone service left anxious citizens approaching strangers to ask if they knew relatives living in other parts of the city and whether they were safe.
The battle for Mariupol is crucial because its capture could allow Moscow to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Several hundred kilometers (miles) west of Mariupol, Russian forces continued their offensive in Mykolaiv, opening fire on the Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people, according to Ukraine's military. Rescuers said they were putting out fires caused by rocket attacks in residential areas.
Ukraine's general staff of the armed forces said in a statement Tuesday that Ukrainian forces are continuing defense operations in the suburbs of the city.
The general staff said "demoralized" Russian forces are engaging in looting in places they have occupied, commandeering civilian buildings like farm hangars for military equipment, and are setting up firing positions in populated areas. The claims could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian defense forces were also involved in operations in the northern city of Chernihiv and the outskirts of Kyiv, the general staff said.
In Kyiv, soldiers and volunteers have built hundreds of checkpoints to protect the city of nearly 4 million, often using sandbags, stacked tires and spiked cables. Some barricades looked significant, with heavy concrete slabs and sandbags piled more than two stories high, while others appeared more haphazard, with hundreds of books used to weigh down stacks of tires.
"Every house, every street, every checkpoint, we will fight to the death if necessary," said Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, with 1.4 million people, heavy shelling slammed into apartment buildings.
"I think it struck the fourth floor under us," Dmitry Sedorenko said from his Kharkiv hospital bed. "Immediately, everything started burning and falling apart." When the floor collapsed beneath him, he crawled out through the third story, past the bodies of some of his neighbors.
In the small town of Horenka, where shelling reduced one area to ashes and shards of glass, rescuers and residents picked through the ruins as chickens pecked around them.
"What are they doing?" rescue worker Vasyl Oksak asked of the Russian attackers. "There were two little kids and two elderly people living here. Come in and see what they have done."
At The Hague, Ukraine pleaded with the International Court of Justice to order a halt to Russia's invasion, saying Moscow is committing widespread war crimes.
Russia "is resorting to tactics reminiscent of medieval siege warfare, encircling cities, cutting off escape routes and pounding the civilian population with heavy ordnance," said Jonathan Gimblett, a member of Ukraine's legal team.
The fighting has sent energy prices surging worldwide and stocks plummeting, and threatens the food supply and livelihoods of people around the globe who rely on crops farmed in the fertile Black Sea region.
The UN human rights office reported 406 confirmed civilian deaths but said the real number is much higher.
On Monday, Moscow again announced a series of demands to stop the invasion, including that Ukraine recognize Crimea as part of Russia and recognize the eastern regions controlled by Moscow-supported separatist fighters as independent. It also insisted that Ukraine change its constitution to guarantee it won't join international bodies like NATO and the EU. Ukraine has already rejected those demands.
Zelenskyy has called for more punitive measures against Russia, including a global boycott of its oil exports, which are key to its economy.
"If [Russia] doesn't want to abide by civilized rules, then they shouldn't receive goods and services from civilization," he said in a video address.
On Monday, the Ukrainian president appealed to American Jews for support with an unsparing account of Russian destruction in his country that he compared to the Nazi German army marching across Europe.
"This is just a pure Nazi behavior. I can't even qualify this in any different manner," Zelenskyy told the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, as he continued to press for a no-fly zone that NATO has so far and more fighter planes from the West which Russia has cautioned against saying it would cause a catastrophic development of the situation there.
Zelenskyy ran through a list of the cities and towns he said had been destroyed by Russian forces, while outnumbered Ukrainians were fighting with everything they had. "They are throwing themselves under the tanks – just for you to understand what's happening here," the Ukrainian leader, who is Jewish, said in a Zoom call.
The Russians are not letting people leave towns and cities they have attacked, are not allowing food and water to be brought in and are disconnecting the internet, television and electricity, he said. "All of this happened during Nazi times. The survival of the Ukrainian nation – the question will be the same as antisemitism … All of these millions of people are going to be exterminated."
Zelenskyy said 13 people died in the bombing of a bakery in Kyiv on Monday and on Sunday, 50 children with cancer had to be moved after a missile hit a pediatric hospital in the city. The scope and scale of the Russian assault on his country was as unexpected and devastating as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were for Americans, he said. "They're bombing the life out of everything that is moving," Zelenskyy told the group.
Also on Monday, Russia told Ukraine it was ready to halt military operations "in a moment" if Kyiv met a list of conditions. Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was demanding that Ukraine cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognize the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.
It was the most explicit Russian statement so far of the terms it wants to impose on Ukraine to halt what it calls its "special military operation", now in its 13th day. Peskov told Reuters in a telephone interview that Ukraine was aware of the conditions. "And they were told that all this can be stopped in a moment."
There was no immediate reaction from the Ukrainian side.
Russia has attacked Ukraine from the north, east and south, pounding cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv and the port of Mariupol. The invasion launched on Feb. 24, has caused the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, provoked outrage across the world, and led to heavy sanctions on Moscow.
But the Kremlin spokesman insisted Russia was not seeking to make any further territorial claims on Ukraine and said it was "not true" that it was demanding Kyiv be handed over.
"We really are finishing the demilitarization of Ukraine. We will finish it. But the main thing is that Ukraine ceases its military action. They should stop their military action and then no one will shoot," he said.
On the issue of neutrality, Peskov said: "They should make amendments to the constitution according to which Ukraine would reject any aims to enter any bloc." He added: "We have also spoken about how they should recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and that they need to recognize that Donetsk and Lugansk are independent states. And that's it. It will stop in a moment."
The outlining of Russia's demands came as delegations from Russia and Ukraine prepared to meet on Monday for a third round of talks aimed at ending Russia's war against Ukraine. It began soon after Putin recognized two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian government forces since 2014, as independent – an action denounced as illegal by the West.
"For the rest. Ukraine is an independent state that will live as it wants, but under conditions of neutrality."
He said all the demands have been formulated and handed over during the first two rounds of talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations, which took place last week.
"We hope that all this will go OK and they will react in a suitable way," Peskov said.
Russia had been forced into taking decisive actions to force the demilitarization of Ukraine, he said, rather than just recognizing the independence of the breakaway regions. This was in order to protect the 3 million Russian-speaking population in these republics, who he said were being threatened by 100,000 Ukrainian troops.
"We couldn't just recognize them. What were we going to do with the 100,000 army that was standing at the border of Donetsk and Lugansk that could attack at any moment. They were being brought U.S. and British weapons all the time," he said.
In the run-up to the Russian invasion, Ukraine repeatedly and emphatically denied Moscow's assertions that it was about to mount an offensive to take back the separatist regions by force.
Peskov said the situation in Ukraine had posed a much greater threat to Russia's security than it had in 2014, when Russia had also amassed 150,000 troops at its border with Ukraine, prompting fears of a Russian invasion, but had limited its action to the annexation of Crimea.
"Since then the situation has worsened for us. In 2014, they began supplying weapons to Ukraine and preparing the army for NATO, bringing it in line with NATO standards," he said. "In the end what tipped the balance was the lives of these 3 million people in Donbass. We understood they would be attacked."
Peskov said Russia had also had to act in the face of the threat it perceived from NATO, saying it was "only a matter of time" before the alliance placed missiles in Ukraine as it had in Poland and Romania. "We just understood we could not put up with this anymore. We had to act," he said.
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