A total of 4,554 people were evacuated from Ukrainian cities through humanitarian corridors on Wednesday, a senior official said, considerably fewer than managed to escape the previous day.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the president's office, said in an online post that 2,912 people had left the besieged city of Mariupol in private vehicles. On Tuesday, he said 8,057 people had managed to escape from cities across the country.
Russia held a funeral service for the deputy commander of its Black Sea Fleet in annexed Crimea on Wednesday, the latest in what Ukraine says is a string of high-ranking Russian military casualties since Moscow invaded on February 24th.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak on Sunday named six Russian generals who he said had been killed in Ukraine along with dozens of colonels and other officers.
Russia's Defence Ministry has not confirmed any of those casualties. It has not revised its troop casualties since March 2nd, a week into the war, when it said that 498 of its soldiers had died. Ukraine puts the figure at 15,600.
Reuters could not independently verify most of Ukraine's claims, but some have been confirmed from Russian sources.
Local Russian government in the southern port of Novorossiysk confirmed the death on February 28th of Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky in a statement on its website. It said he had served in Syria, the North Caucasus and Abkhazia.
