Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expects violent Russian attacks in the east of his country. “Russian soldiers are being brought to Donbass. Likewise in the direction of Kharkiv,” the head of state said in a video speech on Saturday night. “The situation in the east of our country remains very difficult.”
The Ukrainian General Staff announced that Russian troops would be withdrawn from the exclusion zone around the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant and adjacent areas in Belarus. Apparently, they would be transferred to the Russian region of Belgorod, from where the advance to Kharkiv would take place.
Attacks on southern cities
The British military assumed that the explosions at a fuel depot and an ammunition depot in Belgorod slowed Russian troops supplying in Kharkiv. This was announced by the Ministry of Defense in a tweet. A fuel depot in Belgorod caught fire on Friday morning. Local authorities attributed this to the attack by two Ukrainian attack helicopters. Sources in Kiev were evasive. Days earlier, there were explosions at an ammunition depot in Belgorod.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian troops fired rockets at several major cities in the south of the country on Saturday night. Two or three strong explosions were heard in the city of Dnipro, the portal Ukrajinska Pravda reported, citing the regional administration.
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The area around the city of Kryvyi Rih was targeted with rocket launchers. A gas station caught fire, said the head of the local military administration, Olexander Wilkul. According to him, Russian forces used several Grad (Hagel) rocket launchers.
Like all combat zone reports, the information was not independently verifiable. Vikul said the Kryvyi Rih district and the Dnipropetrovsk region as a whole are stable in the hands of the Ukrainian army. The Black Sea port city of Odessa was also hit by rockets late on Friday.
According to Zelensky, more than 3,000 people were brought to safety in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “Today there were humanitarian corridors in three regions: Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia,” Zelenskyy said. “We managed to save 6,266 people, including 3,071 people from Mariupol.”
The Ukrainian president did not specify whether the people of Mariupol were taken directly from the city surrounded by the Russian army or if they first fled Mariupol on their own and were later taken to safety. On Friday night, dozens of buses with civilians from Mariupol and other displaced people on board arrived in Zaporizhia, 220 kilometers away. The people of Mariupol initially fled on their own to the city of Berdiansk, which was occupied by the Russian army.