Land mines littered a proposed route for Ukrainians to flee, Red Cross official says

• A Red Cross official said a proposed humanitarian corridor in Ukraine was lined with land mines.
• President Volodymyr Zelensky has criticized Russian efforts to thwart civilians trying to flee.

A top International Red Cross official told the BBC on Monday that a proposed humanitarian zone in Mariupol, Ukraine, was lined with land mines, the latest sign of the struggle to allow women and children to flee Russia's war on the country.

"That is why it is so important that the two parties have a precise agreement for us then to be able to facilitate it on the ground," Dominik Stillhart, the director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told BBC 4.

Stillhart said some Red Cross staff had tried to take the proposed route out of Mariupol before realizing that it was mined.

Russian and Ukrainian officials have tried for days to agree to limited cease-fires that would allow women and children to evacuate to safer areas and give international aid workers safe passage to those needing care.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said there were no "humanitarian corridors," despite Russian promises a day earlier to stop firing on key Ukrainian cities.

"There was a lot of talk about humanitarian corridors," Zelensky said in a Sunday-night video address. "There were talks every day about the opportunity for people to leave the cities where Russians came. But there are no humanitarian corridors. Instead of humanitarian corridors, they can only make bloody ones."

Mariupol Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov told CNN on Monday that the aim of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian army was to kill as many citizens as possible.

The International Criminal Court and similar bodies have begun war-crimes investigations.

Russian forces killed four people on Sunday as they tried to flee the city of Irpin, The New York Times reported.

Putin has denied that his forces are targeting civilians, but Times journalists reported seeing "only a handful of Ukrainian troops" near the bridge that was hit when the mortar shelling began.