However, there are almost no departures from the arduous city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine; the fight is taking place in the streets. The city and its surroundings are under heavy artillery fire, the Ukrainian General Staff said. It is impossible to bring civilians hiding in bunkers under the Azot chemical plant to safety, said Luhansk Governor Serhiy Hajday.
The British Defense Ministry estimates that with bridges destroyed, civilians have few routes out of the city beyond humanitarian corridors unilaterally issued by Russia and its allies. On the other hand, in previous cases in Ukraine and also in Syria, Moscow has abused these corridors as a way to gain battlefield advantages and forcibly relocate people. Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of civilians are said to be holding out at the Azot chemical plant.
Russia has once again lost a ship in its Black Sea fleet to attacks by the Ukrainian military. The tugboat “Vasily Bech” was damaged by Ukrainian missiles. “It later became known that he sank,” Odessa’s military governor Maxym Marchenko said in a video speech on his Telegram channel. There is no confirmation from Russian or independent sources. According to Ukrainian sources, the ship, which was commissioned in 2017 and equipped with a Tor air defense system, was hit by Harpoon missiles. Denmark supplied the anti-ship missiles to Ukraine.
According to local authorities, rockets landed in the city of Kryvji Rih, in central Ukraine. Authorities announced on the short message service Telegram that there were at least two victims. A neighborhood in the south of the city was hit. Kryvyi Rih is located in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
According to a high-ranking general, the Ukrainian army has suffered heavy material losses since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. “So far, as a result of active fighting, we have about 30 to 40, sometimes even 50 percent, equipment losses,” Brigadier General Volodymyr Karpenko told the American magazine “National Defense”. “An estimated 1,300 infantry fighting vehicles, 400 tanks and 700 artillery systems were lost.”
Two US soldiers fighting in the Ukrainian army and captured by troops loyal to Moscow were featured in Russian media. In an interview with the Kremlin-affiliated newspaper Izvestia, one of the men justified himself by believing in Western “propaganda” about the “bad Russians” and therefore went to war, which the newspaper showed on its Telegram channel on Friday. “Western media doesn’t tell us how incompetent and corrupt the Ukrainian army is,” he said.
The second prisoner appeared on the Kremlin’s RT channel. He sent only a greeting to his mother and spoke of the hope of being able to return home.
Meanwhile, Ukraine wants to join the European Union as soon as possible. Zelenskyy stressed the value this would also have for the EU. “Our rapprochement with the European Union is not only positive for us,” he said in his video speech in Kyiv. “This is the biggest contribution to Europe’s future in many years.” Meanwhile, Zelenskyy visited Mykolayiv in the south of the country. A video posted on Saturday on his Telegram channel shows Zelensky inspecting the city’s ruins and handing out medals after a briefing.
In a TV interview conducted in English by the German Press Agency on Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his confidence that EU states would find a common position on Ukraine’s application for membership. On Friday, the EU Commission spoke out in favor of the official nomination of Ukraine and Moldova as candidates for membership of the European Union. The heads of state and government already want to discuss the matter at a summit meeting at the end of next week.