Ukrainian refugee women and children evacuate to Moldova
The NGO Team Humanity brings aid to Ukraine and evacuates women and children out of the country.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Russian military troops evacuated the heavily contaminated Chernobyl nuclear power plant early Friday, handing control back to the Ukrainians.
Moscow took control of Chernobyl over a month ago. According to Ukrainian officials, Russian forces last week destroyed a new laboratory at the facility that is working to improve radioactive waste management and contained “highly active samples and samples of radionuclides.”
Other reports suggest that over 100 workers at the factory were stuck there for more than 12 days in early March after Russian forces seized them.
Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Energoatom said the Russian pullout from Chernobyl was because soldiers received “significant doses of radiation” while digging trenches in the forest in the exclusion zone around the closed facility. But there is no independent confirmation of this.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russian withdrawal from the north and center of the country was just a military tactic.
USA TODAY IN TELEGRAM: Join our new Russia-Ukraine War Channel to get updates straight to your phone.
Latest developments
►The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region claimed, according to a Telegram post, that Ukraine flew attack helicopters into Russia on Friday morning and attacked an oil depot. Vyacheslav Gladkov claimed that two people were injured in the helicopter attack and the plant caught fire. The attack would be the first of its kind if confirmed.
►Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree on Thursday requiring payment for natural gas in rubles, but appeared to soften the order by allowing dollar and euro payments through a designated bank
►Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday that his country would send Bushmaster armored vehicles to Ukraine to help in its war against Russia.
Russia and Ukraine will resume negotiations online on Friday, a Ukrainian diplomat involved in the peace talks told Telegram on Wednesday.
The two countries held face-to-face talks in Turkey on Tuesday as the United Nations pushed for a ceasefire in Russia’s brutal invasion. The talks took place at the Turkish president’s office in Istanbul and lasted more than three hours, Russia’s Tass agency reported.
Tuesday’s negotiations failed to yield a breakthrough, prompting President Joe Biden to pledge additional $500 million in aid to Ukraine earlier this week.
– Celina Tebor
China accuses the United States of instigating the war in Ukraine and says NATO should have been dissolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“As the culprit and leading instigator of the Ukraine crisis, the US pushed NATO to participate in five rounds of eastward enlargement in the past two decades after 1999,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters at a daily briefing on Friday.
“The number of NATO members has increased from 16 to 30, and they have advanced more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) east to somewhere near the Russian border, gradually pushing Russia to the wall,” Zhao said.
While China says it takes no sides in the conflict, it has declared an “unlimited” partnership with Moscow, refused to condemn the invasion, opposed sanctions against Russia, and routinely reinforced Russian disinformation about the conflict, including the renunciation on calling it an invasion or a war in Russian practice.
Zhao’s comments came as leaders of China and the European Union met virtually for a summit where Ukraine was expected to dominate discussions. EU officials say they are awaiting a pledge from China not to undermine sanctions and to help efforts to end the fighting.
— Associated Press
A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross hopes to enter Ukraine’s Mariupol on Friday to deliver emergency humanitarian aid and begin evacuating residents of the besieged areas, the New York Times reported.
Tens of thousands of people have made it out of Mariupol via humanitarian corridors in recent weeks, according to Ukrainian officials, reducing the pre-war population to about 100,000 from 430,000 last week.
“There seems to be a glimmer of hope that we might be able to go, so we need to be close,” said Crystal Wells, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Geneva, according to the Times.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said late Thursday that 12 Ukrainian trucks were able to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, but the supplies were confiscated by Russian troops. Vereshchuk added that about 45,000 Mariupol residents have been forcibly returned to Russia and areas of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Contribution: The Associated Press