According to Ukrainian state-owned company Energoatom, Russian troops concentrated around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant began withdrawing towards Belarus on Thursday. According to this information, the occupants informed the Ukrainian personnel monitoring the security of the premises of the imminent withdrawal in the morning. The US Department of Defense and the Ukrainian military had previously reported signs of an imminent withdrawal from the area around the plant that was damaged in 1986.
Russian troops had already occupied the area around the ruins of the reactor, the reactors that were shut down regularly in 2000 and the nuclear waste storage facility in the early days of the war. The situation at Chernobyl has caused great international concern because power has been intermittently cut off from the facilities and because Russian troops have only allowed a partial rotation of personnel once since late February. Fires in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which has been radioactive since 1986, have also been reported.
Mariupol train scheduled for Friday
According to Energoatom, Russian troops dug trenches in some of the most contaminated areas. According to Energoatom, several signs of radiation sickness appeared among Russian soldiers. As a result, there was almost a mutiny in the troops demanding that they leave the area. Images circulated on social media on Thursday that allegedly show special medical vehicles that would have been used to transport irradiated soldiers from the area.
According to the Red Cross, a convoy of buses is scheduled to take Mariupol residents out of the besieged city, which was largely destroyed by bombing by Russian forces. In Mariupol, some 170,000 people are holding out in catastrophic conditions. Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced Thursday morning that Russia has agreed to open a humanitarian corridor to areas controlled by Ukraine. From southern Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces reported that several cities were recaptured.