Odessa airport was bombed
“The enemy struck from Crimea with a Bastion coastal defense missile system. The runway of Odessa airport was destroyed,” Governor Maxim Marchenko said in a video on his Telegram account. Odessa, a large port city on the Black Sea with a population of one million and great symbolic and historical importance, has so far been relatively spared from the fighting.
It is in the strip of coastline that Russia could seize to establish a western link with the pro-Russian separatist enclave of Transnistria in Moldova, where it maintains troops.
Civilians murdered in Boutcha
In the north of the country, three bodies with their hands tied were found in a grave the day before in Myrotske, a village near Boutcha near Kyiv. “The victims were tortured for a long time […] In the end, each of them was shot in the temple,” Kyiv region police chief Andriy Nebytov said in a statement.
Survivors of March’s occupation of Boutcha by Russian troops had spoken this week of the prisoners kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs, the mass executions and the pools of blood in homes.
Russian reconnaissance plane violates Swedish airspace
A Russian reconnaissance aircraft briefly violated Swedish airspace on Friday, said employees of the Scandinavian country, which is considering possible NATO membership. “The aircraft was located east of Bornholm (a Danish island in the Baltic Sea) and then headed for Swedish territory,” the brief statement said.
The Swedish defense minister condemned this raid. “It is completely unacceptable to violate Swedish airspace […] This approach is unprofessional and highly inappropriate given the general security situation. Swedish sovereignty must always be respected,” wrote Peter Hultqvist on public television SVT.
900 dead in Boutcha according to Zelenskyy
In an interview with the Polish press on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimated the number of bodies discovered in the Boutcha area at 900. Since Russian soldiers burned and buried bodies, “nobody knows how many people died,” he added .
France joins in
For his part, French President Emmanuel Macron, after a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, said that France would “increase” its supplies of military equipment to Ukraine — particularly long-range weapons — in order to “restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” “.
Westerners, including the United States, France and Britain, have promised the Ukrainians hundreds of howitzers, but time is running out.
Angelina Jolie in Lviv
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie, envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, made a surprise visit to Lviv in western Ukraine, where she spoke to displaced people and was spotted in a café. “For all of us, this visit was a surprise,” wrote the governor of the Lviv region Maxim Kozytsky on Telegram, posting photos and videos of the actress playing with children and posing with volunteers.
Angelina Jolie was seen today with refugees at a train station in Lviv, Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/EmGrfqFmtV
— Series Info (@SeriesUpdateFR) April 30, 2022
At a hospital, she was visiting children injured in the April 8 bombardment outside Kramatorsk station in the east of the country, which was attributed to Russia, which the governor said had killed more than 50 civilians.
Twenty civilians were evacuated from Mariupol
Twenty civilians left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, a Russian-besieged port in southeastern Ukraine, to be evacuated to Zaporijjia, the Azov regiment defending the site said.
Smoke rises from Azovstal in Mariupol.
Andrei BORODULIN/AFP
“Twenty civilians, women and children […] were transferred to an agreed place, and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, Ukraine-controlled territory,” Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment, said in a video on Telegram. A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, escaped from Azovstal, a huge steel plant blocking hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
prisoner exchange
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced via Telegram that a prisoner exchange had taken place, during which fourteen Ukrainians, including a pregnant soldier, were freed. In an interview with the BBC on Friday, she accused Russia of “deporting” a thousand Ukrainian civilians, including 500 women, to its territory and holding them as “hostages” in detention centers.
She mentioned the difficulty of releasing the women. “Now we refuse to arrange an exchange without women on the list,” she explained.