A mayor in a Ukrainian city occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.
Slavutych, a northern town near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters in the main square on Saturday.
The crowd demanded the release of Mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been captured by Russian troops.
Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed, and Fomichev was released by his captors on Saturday afternoon.
It was agreed that if those with guns handed them over to the mayor with a waiver for those with hunting rifles, the Russians would leave the city.
Fomichev told protesters the Russians have agreed to withdraw “if there are none [Ukrainian] military in the city.
The agreement reached, the mayor said, was that the Russians would search for Ukrainian soldiers and weapons and then withdraw. A Russian checkpoint outside the city would remain.
The incident underscores the struggle that Russian forces have faced, even where they have won military victories.
Slavutych, 25,000 inhabitants, is located just outside the so-called exclusion zone around Chernobyl – which was the scene of the worst nuclear disaster in the world in 1986. The facility itself was seized by Russian forces shortly after the February 24 invasion began.
“The Russians opened fire in the air. They threw stun grenades into the crowd. But the residents did not disappear, on the contrary, more of them appeared,” said Oleksandr Pavlyuk, governor of the Kyiv region, where Slavutych is based.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine claimed that Russia is “trying to intensify the activities of sabotage and reconnaissance groups in Kyiv in order to destabilize the socio-political situation and disrupt the system of public and military administration.”
Western officials said Vladimir Putin planned to take Ukraine’s capitals within days of announcing his “special military operation” on February 24 but met unexpectedly fierce opposition.
While blasts of fighting can be heard occasionally in Kyiv in the west of the city, the center has been mostly quiet for the past two weeks.
“First they wanted a blitz, 72 hours, to gain control [of] Kyiv and much of Ukraine, and everything fell apart,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and chief negotiator in the talks with Russia, in an interview in Kyiv.
“They had poor operational planning and realized that it was to their advantage to encircle cities, cutting off the main supply routes and forcing the people there to lack of food, water and medicine,” he said, describing the siege of Mariupol as a tactic to sow psychological terror and exhaustion.
However, Podolyak expressed skepticism about a claim by Russia’s defense ministry on Friday that Moscow’s forces were now mainly focused on the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
“Of course I don’t think so. They have no interests in the Donbass. Their main interests are Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and the south — to take Mariupol and close the Sea of Azov… we see them regrouping and preparing more troops to deploy,” he said.