Dhe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj expects violent Russian attacks in the east of his country. “Russian soldiers are being brought to the Donbass. Likewise in the direction of Kharkiv, ”said the head of state in a video speech on Saturday night. “The situation in the east of our country remains very difficult.”
The Ukrainian General Staff announced that Russian troops would be withdrawn from the exclusion zone around the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant and from adjacent areas in Belarus. Apparently they were to be transferred to the Russian Belgorod region, from where the advance to Kharkiv would take place.
Attacks on cities in the south
The British military assumed that the explosions at a fuel depot and an ammunition depot in Belgorod slowed down supplies to Russian troops off Kharkiv. This was announced by the Ministry of Defense in a tweet. A fuel depot in Belgorod went up in flames on Friday morning. Local authorities attributed this to the attack by two Ukrainian attack helicopters. Sources in Kyiv were evasive. Days earlier there had been explosions in a munitions depot in Belgorod.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian troops fired rockets at several large cities in the south of the country on Saturday night. Two or three heavy explosions were heard in the city of Dnipro, the portal Ukrajinska Pravda reported, citing the regional administration.
The area around the city of Kryvyi Rih was fired at with rocket launchers. A gas station caught fire, said the head of the local military administration, Olexander Wilkul. According to him, the Russian forces used Grad (Hagel) multiple rocket launchers.
Like all reports from the combat zones, the information was not independently verifiable. Vikul said that the Kryvyi Rih district and the Dnipropetrovsk region as a whole are stable in the hands of the Ukrainian army. The port city of Odessa on the Black Sea was also fired at with rockets on Friday evening.
According to Zelensky, more than 3,000 people were brought to safety from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “Today there were humanitarian corridors in three regions: Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia,” said Zelenskyy. “We managed to save 6,266 people, including 3,071 people from Mariupol.”
The Ukrainian President did not specify whether the people of Mariupol were taken directly out of the city surrounded by the Russian army or whether they first fled Mariupol on their own and were then taken to safety. On Friday evening, dozens of buses with civilians from Mariupol and other displaced persons on board arrived in Zaporizhia, 220 kilometers away. The people of Mariupol initially fled on their own to the city of Berdiansk, which was occupied by the Russian army.