Russia-Ukraine live updates: West takes aim at Russian oil and gas while companies halt business

Five thousand Ukrainians and 1,700 foreign students were evacuated from the northeastern Sumy region Tuesday, a Ukrainian official said — a breakthrough after shelling thwarted attempts to shuttle civilians out of other areas.

The deputy prime minister of Ukraine, Iryna Vereshchuk, said during a telethon that the evacuation from Sumy to Poltava “succeeded" with the help of the Red Cross, according to Ukrainian National News. Poltava is nearly 100 miles south.

The foreign students went to Poltava and then toward Lviv and the rest of Europe, she said, according to UNN.

Residents had boarded buses that arrived with supplies and gave priority to children, disabled people and pregnant women, said Dmytro Zhivitsky, the regional governor. He said the only route available was southwest to Poltava and noted that there might not be enough space for everyone who wants to leave.

Residents could also leave by private car, Zhivitsky said, but he said they had to exit the city by 7:30 p.m. even though the “green corridor” would stay open until 9 p.m. local time.

Indian Foreign Minister Arindam Bagchi said Tuesday on Twitter that “all Indian students” in Sumy were part of the evacuation and safely out of the city. From Poltava, he said, the students would take trains to western Ukraine, where efforts would continue to repatriate them to India.

While the governor said the corridor stemmed from an agreement between Ukraine and Russia, he warned that there was still a “very high risk of provocation,” and he urged people to evaluate the risks for themselves.

Russia said Tuesday it was opening humanitarian corridors from a number of besieged cities, as Ukraine accused Moscow’s forces of violating cease-fires that would allow civilians to evacuate. Ukraine said Tuesday that the only agreed routes were for regions inside the country, rejecting the idea of corridors leading to Russia or its ally, Belarus, after Russian officials said earlier that some evacuees would be taken to Gomel, Belarus, and flown to Russia.

A planned evacuation from the southern city of Mariupol could not start Tuesday morning, according to Vereshchuk. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said a fleet of vehicles was ready to deliver aid to the port city and carry civilians northwest but accused Russian forces of violating the cease-fire and shelling the route.

Zina Pozen contributed to this report.

Lumen, a leading American Internet provider to Russia, announced Tuesday that it was severing business relations in the country, a move likely to increase Russia’s isolation as its citizens slip behind what some analysts are calling a new digital Iron Curtain.

Lumen is the second top U.S.-based carrier to make such a move in recent days, following Friday’s announcement by Cogent Communications. Taken together, these moves are likely to make it harder for Russians to gain access to international services, such as news sites and social media based in the West, telecommunications experts said.

American technology and telecommunications companies have been cutting services in Russia since it invaded Ukraine last month. In the same period, Russia’s government has throttled or blocked popular U.S.-based services such as Twitter and Facebook while imposing new criminal penalties for news coverage that doesn’t follow the Kremlin’s strict censorship policies.

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Shortly after midnight in Moscow, the Central Bank announced Russian citizens would no longer be allowed to use rubles to buy dollars and other hard currencies.

“Banks will not sell hard currency to citizens during the period of the temporary order,” the Central Bank said in a statement posted to its website. The order was to expire Sept. 9.

The Central Bank said it also will limit to $10,000 the amount of U.S. dollars that clients can withdraw from hard-currency accounts at Russian banks. Anyone wanting to withdraw more than that from a hard-currency account will have to take the balance in rubles, the Central Bank said.

The measures will prevent Russians from seeking security in the dollar as the ruble plummets to fresh lows in the wake of Western economic sanctions, which have blocked Russia’s access to its foreign currency reserves.

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The trajectory of gas prices at the Mobil station four miles north of the White House has been brutal, clocking in at $3.85 a week ago, $4.17 on Friday, then $4.43 Tuesday, leaving Elizabeth Lopez, a mother of three and employer of six, feeling trapped.

“I don’t know how we can do it,” Lopez said, filling up a Chrysler minivan across from a shuttered tire shop in Northwest Washington.

Geopolitical and market forces have squeezed the owner of a housekeeping business between her employees, who successfully pushed her to double their weekly fuel allowance to $40, and her customers, who face higher prices across the economy and have cut back on her services.

“Everything’s raised up,” said Lopez, 36. “It’s crazy. It’s impact for me. It’s impact for them. It’s impact for everybody.”

The reverberations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are being felt at pumps across the United States, where the national average price for a gallon of gasoline reached $4.17 on Tuesday, the highest since summer 2008, according to AAA. President Biden’s decision to ban the import of Russian oil, backed by key Republicans and Democrats in Congress, could send costs higher.

Bursts of gunfire punctuate an otherwise calm scene of Romens’ka Street in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, according to a video verified by The Washington Post. The video, which was posted to Twitter on Tuesday, confirms shelling continued in the region as civilians tried to evacuate.

One humanitarian corridor, several miles from where this video was filmed, managed to open on Tuesday morning, said Dmytro Zhivitsky, the regional governor. In an update on the messaging app Telegram, Zhivitsky described a similar incident near a checkpoint along city’s outskirts in the “green corridor.”

He assured his followers the situation is calm, but cautioned that these examples prove “there is no hundred percent safety when it comes to moving out.”

Filmed from several stories above ground level, the footage reviewed by The Post shows a column of cars slowly moving down the street. Less than a second in, the first shots are clearly audible. Rapid gunfire continues as the person filming pans the camera, apparently searching for the sound’s origin.

“People are about to evacuate and he starts the fire!” the person filming says. Then the camera zooms in to show several large vehicles beyond the tree line that are surrounded by a cloud of smoke. The person says a tank is shooting and “driving into town!” It is not immediately clear from the video if the vehicles in the distance were tanks.

The United States all-but declined an offer from Poland on Tuesday to deliver an unspecified number of MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine so that the warplanes could be used against invading Russian forces.

“We do not believe Poland’s proposal is a tenable one,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

The unusual public offer, posted on the website of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, blindsided U.S. officials who said they were not consulted by the Polish government ahead of the proposal.

Poland has sought to equip Ukraine with aircraft to fight Russia even as Moscow has warned that any country hosting Ukraine’s military aircraft would be considered a party to the ongoing armed conflict there.

In its statement, Poland said it is “ready to deploy — immediately and free of charge — all their MiG-29 jets to the Ramstein Air Base and place them at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America.” Ramstein is an American military facility located in eastern Germany.

IRPIN, Ukraine — As thousands flee the besieged Kyiv suburb Irpin, allegations are emerging of Russian forces looting, hiding military equipment in residential areas, deploying snipers and cutting water and power as they seek to use the area as a potential launchpad to invade the capital.

In more than 20 interviews conducted over two days, residents who fled Irpin described a dire and volatile environment where the line between combatants and noncombatants is increasingly blurred. Their accounts were likely to be closely examined by Ukrainian officials compiling details for potential war crimes claims.

The Russians have cut off electricity, gas and water to the city, the residents claim, which could violate international humanitarian laws that ban destroying objects during wartime that are vital to the survival of civilians.

Russian military also are parking their tanks in residential areas, apparently using civilians as human shields, witnesses said.

While the reports cannot be independently confirmed, the testimonies of the residents fleeing Irpin are consistent in their accounts and reflect wider concerns across Ukraine that Russian forces are committing potential war crimes as civilian casualties mount.

Several major American food and beverage companies announced Tuesday that they would suspend their operations in Russia, a step that comes after days of mounting public pressure on the corporate world to sever ties with the country over the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The group included McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, some of which had operated in Russia for decades and had faced heightened scrutiny in recent days as other companies elected to halt their business dealings there. A veritable naughty-or-nice list, compiled by a Yale University professor, generated headlines by highlighting the c