Two of Ukraine’s military helicopters struck a fuel storage facility in the Russian city of Belgorod on Friday after crossing the border at low altitude, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
The resulting blaze injured two workers, Gladkov said, while some areas in the city, located close to the Ukrainian border, were being evacuated.
It was not immediately possible to verify the claim or images that were circulating of the alleged attack. If confirmed, it would be Ukraine’s first known incursion into Russian airspace.
Ukraine’s defence ministry has not commented on the allegation, and Russian oil firm Rosneft, which owns the depot, reported the fire without identifying the cause.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kulebawas was asked by reporters on Friday about Belgorod and said he could “neither confirm nor reject” the claim that Ukraine was involved because he did not have enough information.
A Kremlin spokesperson said the incident on Russia’s territory could undermine negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian representatives that resumed by video link Friday.
“Certainly, this is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of the talks,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov replied when asked if the depot fire could be viewed as an escalation of the war in Ukraine.
Goal of controlling separatist region ‘unchanged’
The negotiations between Ukraine and Russia on Friday follow a meeting of Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey on Tuesday where Ukraine reiterated its willingness to abandon a bid to join NATO and offered proposals to have its neutral military status guaranteed by a range of foreign countries.
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, wrote on social media that Moscow’s positions on retaining control of the Crimean Peninsula and expanding the territory in Eastern Ukraine held by Russia-backed separatists “are unchanged.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said conditions weren’t yet “ripe” for a ceasefire and he wasn’t ready for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until the negotiators do more work, Italian Premier Mario Draghi said after a Thursday telephone conversation with the Russian leader.
The International Committee for the Red Cross said complex logistics were still being worked out for the operation to get emergency aid into Mariupol and civilians out of the city, which has suffered weeks of heavy fighting with dwindling water, food and medical supplies.
“We are running out of adjectives to describe the horrors that residents in Mariupol have suffered,” ICRC spokesperson Ewan Watson said Friday during a UN briefing in Geneva. “The situation is horrendous and deteriorating, and it’s now a humanitarian imperative that people be allowed to leave and aid supplies be allowed in.”
Mariupol evacuation limited to private cars
He said the group had sent three vehicles toward Mariupol and a front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces but two trucks carrying supplies for the city were not accompanying them. Dozens of buses organized by Ukrainian authorities to take people out also had not started approaching the dividing line, Watson said.
On Thursday, Russian forces blocked a 45-bus convoy attempting to evacuate people from Mariupol after the Russian military agreed to a limited ceasefire in the area, and only 631 people were able to leave in private cars, the Ukrainian government said.
Russian forces also seized 14 tons of food and medical supplies trying to make it to Mariupol, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
The city has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war. Tens of thousands of residents managed to leave in the past few weeks through humanitarian corridors, reducing the population from a prewar 430,000 to an estimated 100,000 by last week. But continued Russian attacks have repeatedly thwarted aid and evacuation missions.
“We do not see a real desire on the part of the Russians and their satellites to provide an opportunity for Mariupol residents to evacuate to territory controlled by Ukraine,” Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, wrote Friday on the Telegram messaging app.
In the past few days, the Kremlin, in a seeming shift in its war aims, said that its “main goal” now is gaining complete control of the Donbas, where Mariupol is located. The Donbas is the predominantly Russian-speaking industrial region of Eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014 and have declared two areas as independent republics.
Western officials said there were growing indications Russia was using its talk of de-escalation in Ukraine as cover to regroup, resupply and redeploy its forces for a stepped-up offensive in the east.
Ukraine checks Chornobyl after Russians leave
Elsewhere, Russian troops left the heavily contaminated Chornobyl nuclear site early Friday after returning control to the Ukrainians, authorities said.
Ukraine’s state power company, Energoatom, said the pullout at Chornobyl came after Russian soldiers received “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches in the forest in the exclusion zone around the closed plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it could not independently confirm the exposure claim.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Russians behaved irresponsibly at the site during the more than four weeks that they controlled it, preventing staff at the plant from performing their full duties and digging trenches in contaminated areas.
Kuleba told a news conference in Warsaw that the Russian government had exposed its soldiers to radiation, endangering their health. He said Ukraine will work with the UN atomic agency to determine what the occupying Russians did there and mitigate any danger.
IAEA director general Rafael Grossi wrote on Twitter that he would visit the decommissioned plant as soon as possible and his agency’s “assistance and support” mission to Chornobyl “will be the first in a series of such nuclear safety and security missions to Ukraine.”
I will head an <a href=”https://twitter.com/iaeaorg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@IAEAorg</a> assistance and support mission to the <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Chornobyl?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Chornobyl</a> Nuclear Power Plant as soon as possible. It will be the first in a series of such nuclear safety and security missions to <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ukraine?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Ukraine</a>.
—@rafaelmgrossi
Grossi was in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on Friday for talks with senior officials about nuclear issues in Ukraine. Nine of Ukraine’s 15 operational reactors are currently in use, including two at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya facility, the agency said.
Russian forces seized the Chornobyl site soon after invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, raising fears they would cause damage or disruption that could spread radiation. The workforce there oversees the safe storage of spent fuel rods and the concrete-entombed ruins of the reactor that exploded in 1986.
Russian forces have subjected both Chernihiv, a besieged and blockaded city in northern Ukraine, and the capital of Kyiv to continued air and ground-launched missile strikes despite Moscow saying Tuesday it planned to reduce military activity in those areas.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces have retaken the villages of Sloboda and Lukashivka, which are south of the besieged northern city of Chernihiv and located along one of the main supply routes between the city and Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, according to Britain’s defence ministry.
Russia appears to be repositioning its troops away from Kyiv and toward the eastern Donbas region in Ukraine, according to NATO intelligence. The move comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed urgent pleas for immediate support in an address to Australia’s Parliament. 2:01
Ukraine has also continued to make successful but limited counterattacks to the east and northeast of Kyiv, the ministry said.
Western officials said there were growing indications Russia was using its talk of de-escalation in Ukraine as cover to regroup, resupply its forces and redeploy them for a stepped-up offensive in the eastern part of the country.
Zelensky warned that Russian withdrawals from the north and centre of the country were just a military tactic to build up strength for new attacks in the southeast.
“We know their intentions,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address to the nation. “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.”
He went on: “There will be battles ahead.”
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