Russian forces leave Chernobyl
Ukrainian president says withdrawals are a tactic ahead of attacks in East
Russian troops handed control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant back to the Ukrainians and began leaving the heavily contaminated site more than a month after taking it over, authorities said Thursday, as fighting raged on the outskirts of Kyiv and other fronts.
Ukraine’s state power company, Energoatom, said the pullout at Chernobyl came after soldiers received “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches in the forest in the exclusion zone around the closed plant. But there was no independent confirmation of that.
Russian forces seized the Chernobyl site in the opening stages of the Feb. 24 invasion, raising fears that they would cause damage that could spread radiation. The workforce at the site oversees the safe storage of spent fuel rods and the concrete- entombed ruins of the reactor that exploded in 1986.
The withdrawal took place amid growing indications the Kremlin is using talk of de- escalation in Ukraine as cover while regrouping, resupplying its forces and redeploying them for a stepped- up offensive in the eastern part of the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian withdrawals from the north and centre of the country were just a military tactic and that the forces are building up for new powerful attacks in the southeast.
“We know their intentions,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the country. “We know that they are moving away from those areas where we hit them in order to focus on other, very important ones where it may be difficult for us.”
“There will be battles ahead,” he added.
Meanwhile, a convoy of 45 buses headed to Mariupol in another bid to evacuate people from the besieged port city after the Russian military agreed to a limited ceasefire in the area. But Russian forces blocked the buses, and only 631 people were able to get out of the city in private cars, according to the Ukrainian government.
Twelve Ukrainian trucks were able to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, but the supplies were seized by Russian troops, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said late Thursday.
“It’s desperately important that this operation takes place,” the Red Cross said in a statement.
The city has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war. Tens of thousands have managed to get out of Mariupol in the past few weeks by way of humanitarian corridors, reducing its population from a prewar 430,000 to an estimated 100,000 as of last week, but other relief efforts have been thwarted by continued Russian attacks.
A new round of talks was scheduled for Friday, five weeks into the war that has left thousands dead and driven four million Ukrainians from the country.
As western officials search for clues about what Russia’s next move might be, a top British intelligence official said demoralized Russian soldiers in Ukraine are refusing to carry out orders and sabotaging equipment and had accidentally shot down their own aircraft.
In a speech in Australia, Jeremy Fleming, head of the GCHQ electronic spy agency, said Putin had apparently “massively misjudged” the invasion.