Putin says campaign will end if Kyiv stops fighting

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday his campaign in Ukraine was going according to plan and would not end until Kyiv stopped fighting, as efforts to evacuate the heavily bombarded city of Mariupol failed for a second day in a row, Reuters reported.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (IRIC) had hoped to start evacuating 200,000 people from the besieged port city, but failed after hostilities resumed, the BBC reported.
Russia and Ukraine had agreed in principle to evacuate civilians, but had failed to agree on the details of how the evacuation would take place, the ICRC was quoted as saying by the BBC.

The areas of disagreement were: specific time, locations, evacuation routes, who would be evacuated and whether aid could also be brought in.

The Mariupol City Council, which announced a ceasefire and fresh evacuation attempt this morning, told the BBC that the plans were aborted as Russian shelling had made safe evacuation impossible.

The city is now in its fifth day with no water, no power, no sanitation, and food and drinking water are fast running out, the BBC reported.

Earlier, Deputy Head of the People's Militia of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Eduard Basurin said humanitarian corridors in Mariupol and Volnovakha will open again on Sunday morning.

"In the morning, the humanitarian corridors will open again both in Mariupol and Volnovakha. We still hope that those Ukrainian commanders who are in charge of defending populated localities will command their subordinates to unblock the exit from the populated localities so that civilians would be able to leave these populated localities," he told journalists, the TASS reported.
 
More than 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine in just 10 days, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).
 
President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians they have "withstood the blow" of Russia's invasion as he urged citizens to continue fighting.
 
In a speech on Saturday night from Kyiv, Zelensky said, "You need to go out and drive this evil out of our cities."
 
The cry came alongside a plea to US President Joe Biden to source more combat jets for Ukraine, the CNN reported.
 
Ukraine had on Friday accused the Kremlin of "nuclear terror", after Europe's largest atomic power plant was attacked and taken over by invading forces, the Kyiv Post reported.
 
Allaying concerns of Nato intervention, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Sunday said that Nato did not harbour animosity towards Russian people, nor did it question Russia's status as a world power.
 
He wrote that "Ukraine had no serious prospect of NATO membership in the near future," adding, "This is not a NATO conflict, and it will not become one. No ally has sent combat troops to Ukraine," TASS reported.
 
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 people were reportedly detained in Russian cities after jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny called for anti-war protests.
 
On the economic front, both Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia.
The measures were taken in the light of the current situation around Ukraine. However, Mastercard said it will "work to restore operations" when "it is appropriate, and if it is permissible under the law."