Madam Minister, on Friday the Kramatorsk train station in the region was hit, resulting in numerous deaths.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

  • Follow I follow

Two Russian missiles landed there.

Thousands of civilians were waiting at the train station to be evacuated, everyone knew that.

All I can say is that President Putin must be stopped.

Help us.

You lose some money, we lose our lives.

On Thursday you urged the residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to run to safety "until it is too late".

Is there a second wave of refugees?

Our concern is that if fighting resumes there, our citizens will be cut off from the evacuation routes we are establishing.

That tells us the experience of the last few weeks.

At the beginning of the war, we could not imagine that the Russians would besiege cities and starve, in violation of international law.

Now we know.

The new evacuations have started.

Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they want to leave the country.

The mayor of Dnipro, a city of over a million inhabitants, is now calling on people to leave the city, while the mayor of Kyiv is appealing to those who have left the country not to return for the time being.

The occupiers would abuse the people as living shields.

Therefore, they also hinder the evacuations.

As in Mariupol, they would occupy a hospital, hold the patients captive and install their weapons there.

We have to prevent that.

The besieged city of Mariupol cannot be evacuated.

French President Macron intervened twice, for the first time in early March.

He asked Putin to open a so-called humanitarian corridor.

Putin cleverly used Macron's name, but did nothing about it.

The corridor then led to Russia and had not been agreed with anyone.

Macron was very disappointed.

In short: on March 5th we started to work on a corridor from Mariupol.

Macron, the Pope, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, the UN have been involved ever since.

But it never worked.

This is our great pain.

It is said that this is due to the broken ceasefire.

We declare the opening of a corridor, but Mariupol is surrounded by the Russians, we have no troops there.

So they can't open fire either.

Only the Russians stand in the corridor, and if something happens, only they will be responsible.

That's why they don't want these corridors.

On April 1, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) made a desperate attempt to negotiate with Russia and send buses to Mariupol.

Russia promised: Yes, come.

People left on April 2nd.

The fighters of the "Donetsk People's Republic" took them hostage.

They detained the ICRC workers in the city of Manhush, interrogated them, gave them nothing to eat.

The staff called us in tears.

ICRC chief Peter Maurer had negotiated everything in Moscow.

They were only released after five days, but were not allowed to continue to Mariupol, 20 kilometers away.

I'm already getting gray hairs from these corridors.

Could the ICRC do more?