Ukrainians retake areas near Kyiv
Zelenskyy: Russia is leaving behind mines, gear, bodies
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian troops moved cautiously to retake territory north of the country’s capital on Saturday, using cables to pull the bodies of civilians off streets of one town out of fear that Russian forces may have left them boobytrapped.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that departing Russian troops were creating a “catastrophic” situation for civilians by leaving mines around homes, abandoned equipment and “even the bodies of those killed.” His claims could not be independently verified.
Journalists in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, watched as Ukrainian soldiers backed by a column of tanks and other armored vehicles used cables to drag bodies off a street from a distance. Locals said the dead — the AP counted at least six — were civilians killed without provocation by departing Russian soldiers.
“Those people were just walking and they shot them without any reason. Bang,” said a Bucha resident who declined to give his name citing safety reasons. “In the next neighborhood, Stekolka, it was even worse. They would shoot without asking any question.”
Ukraine and its Western allies reported mounting evidence of Russia withdrawing its forces from
around Kyiv and building its troop strength in eastern Ukraine.
“The initial Russian operation was a failure, and one of its central goals — the capture of Kyiv — proved unobtainable for Russian forces,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Virginia, said Saturday.
But the shift did not mean the country faced a reprieve from more than five weeks of war or that the more than 4 million refugees who have fled Ukraine will return soon. Zelenskyy said he expects departed towns
to endure airstrikes and for the battle in the east to be intense.
“It’s still not possible to return to normal life, as it used to be, even at the territories that we are taking back after the fighting,” the president said.
Moscow’s focus on eastern Ukraine also kept the besieged southeastern city of Mariupol in the crosshairs. The port city on the Sea of Azov is located in the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region, where Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian troops for eight years. Military analysts think Russian
President Vladimir Putin is determined to capture the region.
The International Committee of the Red Cross planned to try to get into Mariupol to evacuate residents after canceling the operation the previous day when it did not receive assurances the route was safe. Local authorities said Russian forces blocked access to the city. There was no word as of late Saturday whether the Red Cross managed to reach Mariupol.
An adviser to Zelenskyy, Oleksiy Arestovych, said in an interview that Russia and Ukraine had reached an
agreement to allow 45 buses to drive to Mariupol to evacuate residents “in coming days.”
The Mariupol city council said earlier Saturday that 10 empty buses were headed to Berdyansk, a city about 50 miles west of Mariupol, to pick up people who managed to get there on their own. About 2,000 made it out of Mariupol on Friday, city officials said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said 765 Mariupol residents on Saturday used private vehicles to reach Zaporizhzhia, a city still under Ukrainian control that has served as the destination for other planned evacuations.
Among those escaping was Tamila Mazurenko, who said she fled Mariupol on Monday, made it to Berdyansk that night and then took a bus to Zaporizhzhia. Mazurenko said she waited for a bus until Friday, spending one night sleeping in a field.
“I have only one question: Why?” she said of her city’s ordeal. “We only lived as normal people.”
Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian forces for over a month and suffered some of the war’s worst attacks, including on a maternity hospital and a theater that was sheltering civilians. Around 100,000 people are believed to remain in the city, down from a prewar population of 430,000, and they face dire shortages of necessities.
The city’s capture would give Moscow an unbroken land bridge from Russia to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014. But its resistance also has taken on symbolic significance during Russia’s invasion, said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Ukrainian think tank Penta.
“Without its conquest, Putin cannot sit down at the negotiating table,” Fesenko said of Mariupol.
About 500 refugees from eastern Ukraine arrived in the Russian city of Kazan by train overnight. Asked if he saw a chance to return home, Mariupol resident Artur Kirillov answered, “That’s unlikely, there is no city anymore.”