Air raid alert sounded in Kyiv, civilians urged to go to bomb shelters

An air alert is declared in and around Kyiv, with residents urged to get to bomb shelters as quickly as possible.

Air raid sirens have gone off in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Lubny, Poltava, and Vasylkiv, according to several local Ukrainian media outlets.

The alarms signal potential danger from airstrikes and are a warning to residents to take shelter in bunkers if they're not there already.

Earlier we reported that some journalists had reported hearing explosions in Kyiv. That has not as yet been reported by local Ukrainian media.

For days, as Moscow’s forces have laid siege to Ukrainian cities, attempts to create corridors to safely evacuate civilians have stumbled amid continuing fighting and objections to the proposed routes. Ukraine has rejected Moscow’s offers of corridors that lead civilians to Russia or its ally Belarus.

The Russian military has denied firing on convoys and charged that the Ukrainian side is blocking evacuation efforts.

One evacuation did appear successful Tuesday, with Vereshchuk saying that 5,000 civilians, including 1,700 foreign students, had been brought out via a safe corridor from Sumy, an embattled northeastern city of a quarter-million people where overnight strikes killed 21, including two children.

Across the country, thousands are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in nearly two weeks of fighting. Russian forces have seen their advances stopped in certain areas — including around Kyiv, the capital, where a vast armored column has been stalled for days — by fiercer resistance than expected from the Ukrainians.