Berlin The Russian army continued to shell western Ukraine on Holy Saturday. Explosions erupted in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and in Lviv near the Polish border on Saturday. Russia spoke of a strike against an armaments factory in Kyiv. According to Ukrainian information, Russian military aircraft launched in Belarus attacked Lviv with cruise missiles. Four Russian cruise missiles were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses.
According to Ukrainian authorities, at least two civilians were killed and four others injured in Russian attacks in the east of the country. In large parts of the country, sirens warned the population of air raids.
According to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, rescue workers rushed to the site of the explosion in Kyiv. It happened in the Darnytskyi district in the south-east of the city, Klitschko wrote on the Telegram messenger service. Initially, nothing was known about the victims.
According to the Interfax news agency, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that buildings belonging to armaments factories had been destroyed in Kyiv and in Mykolaiv in the south of the country. The attacks were carried out with high-precision long-range weapons. In addition, a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter plane was shot down near the city of Izyum near Kharkiv.
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The governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, told Telegram that one civilian was killed and three others injured in Russian attacks. He called on the population to evacuate as long as this was still possible. Buses are ready to take people to safety. The governor of the Poltava region west of Luhansk also reported civilian casualties. One person was killed and one injured in a night attack on a village near the regional capital Poltava.
Reconstruction of the liberated areas begins slowly
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sees his country confronted with massive challenges in towns and cities formerly occupied by Russian troops. The amount of work to restore normal life is “really enormous”.
The Ukrainian authorities are continuing to restore normal life in the areas that are again under Ukrainian control, Zelensky said in his evening video message on Saturday night. The scope of the work in the 918 towns and cities of different sizes is massive.
Mining work is being carried out and the supply of electricity, water and gas to the places is restored. The police, post office and local authorities are also resuming their work. Train connections have been set up again in the Sumy region in the north-east of the country or are about to be resumed with the city of Chernihiv in the north.
Humanitarian staffs have so far been established in 338 such locations. These provided, among other things, emergency medical care, said Selenski. Schools and other educational institutions should also be resumed where possible.
As of Friday, Russian troops had destroyed or damaged 1,018 educational institutions in the country, Zelenskiy said. The information could not be independently verified.
Destruction in the city of Sieverodonetsk
According to Ukrainian sources, the city of Sievjerodonetsk in the Luhansk region was also badly damaged by the Russian war of aggression. According to the head of the city’s military administration, Olexandr Strjuk, the city is about 70 percent destroyed.
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The most important roads were badly damaged and the water supply was also shut down pending repair work, Stryuk said on Ukraine’s national television. Of the around 130,000 residents before the war, only around 20,000 people are still on site, he said. The information could not initially be independently verified.
According to Ukrainian sources, at least ten people were killed when the industrial district of the eastern Ukrainian metropolis of Kharkiv was shelled. A seven-month-old baby was among the victims, the prosecutor’s office for the Kharkiv region announced on Facebook on Friday evening.
Ukraine also reported a Russian airstrike on an airfield in the city of Oleksandriya in the Kirovohrad region of central Ukraine. The rescue work was going on, Mayor Serhiy Kuzmenko wrote on Facebook. There was initially no information about damage or casualties.
Zelensky: 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed
In addition to the number of up to 3,000 dead, Zelensky also mentioned the number of around 10,000 injured soldiers on the Ukrainian side on CNN. How many civilians have been killed since the invasion began on February 24 remains unclear. The number of up to 20,000 killed Russian soldiers quoted by the Ukrainian President differs greatly from Russian figures from March, when 1,351 soldiers were killed and 3,825 injured.
Zelenskiy paid tribute to the Ukrainian troops in a nightly video speech. “Our military’s achievements on the battlefield are truly significant, historically significant”. But they are not enough to liberate Ukraine from the occupying forces. Zelensky reiterated his demand for the delivery of heavy weapons. According to Selenski, the situation in the east and south of the country remains difficult.
Read more about the Ukraine war here:
Moscow imposes a travel ban on Johnson
Russia has imposed a travel ban on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in response to Western sanctions over the Ukraine war. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Secretary of State Liz Truss are also no longer allowed to go to Russia. A list published by the Foreign Ministry in Moscow includes the names of 13 British officials. Russia had previously issued entry bans against US President Joe Biden and leading representatives of the European Union, Australia and New Zealand.
The Foreign Ministry in Moscow accused the British government of “unprecedented hostile actions”. London is behind an “information campaign” aimed at isolating Russia internationally and damaging it economically. The new Western sanctions came into effect more than seven weeks ago, ahead of the start of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The United States has also personally sanctioned Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, as well as other government officials.
Russia had previously issued protest notes to several Western countries over arms sales to Ukraine. The United States was among them, said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, according to the Interfax agency. According to the US daily Washington Post, Moscow warns in the letter that such deliveries could have “unpredictable consequences”.
CDU politician Röttgen: Ukraine cannot defend itself with money
In the traffic light coalition, there had recently been a dispute over the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine. Politicians from the Greens and FDP had accused Chancellor Scholz of hesitation. It has now been agreed that the funds for the so-called upgrading initiative will be significantly increased this year from 225 million to 2 billion euros. This is a program that supports partner countries in crisis regions so that they can invest in more security. Ukraine should get more than a billion euros from it.
The CDU foreign politician Norbert Röttgen clearly criticized the plan. “Unfortunately I have to say it. What Scholz and Lindner came up with is cynical,” Röttgen wrote on Twitter on Saturday, referring to Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP). “While all of Europe is asking Germany for leadership and responsibility, they are busy saving face for the disputing parties in the federal government.”
The Russian major offensive is imminent. Ukraine cannot defend itself with money, it needs weapons “and as quickly as possible,” wrote Röttgen. “Buying weapons in Germany with German money takes time: the Bundestag has to discuss and decide on a supplementary budget, then permits for arms exports have to be applied for and approved and finally the weapons have to be delivered. Then it’s summer.”
The chairman of the Bundestag’s Europe Committee, Anton Hofreiter (Greens), told the “Welt am Sonntag”: “The increase is a good first step, but (it) cannot replace the direct delivery of weapons.” An oil embargo must also be implemented quickly, to cut off Russia from important revenues, he added.
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Germans at odds over Ukraine war
According to a recent survey, people in East and West Germany react differently to the Ukraine war and its effects. In West Germany, almost two thirds of the people (64 percent) are willing to do without energy from Russia even in the event of an energy shortage, summarized the Eon Foundation the result of a representative survey by the opinion research institute Civey among 10,000 German citizens. In eastern Germany, less than half of those surveyed (42 percent) supported such a step.
According to the survey, the willingness to turn down the heating or drive less in the event of energy shortages is also much more pronounced in the West. While in the old federal states between 55 and 70 percent of those surveyed said they wanted to turn down the heating in the event of an energy shortage, less than half of those surveyed in eastern Germany (excluding Berlin) indicated that they intended to take such a step.
As an alternative to Russian gas, respondents in eastern Germany favored domestic coal, while respondents in the west favored solar and wind energy.
“The war in Ukraine has once again revealed the different attitudes of West and East Germans in relation to the energy transition and climate protection,” write the authors of the Eon Foundation in the evaluation of the survey. Overall, the skepticism about effective climate protection and the expansion of renewable energies among the citizens in the often rural regions of East Germany seems to be more pronounced in this tense situation than in West Germany.
Nationwide, rising energy prices employ people in rural regions (52 percent) significantly more than people in metropolitan areas (38 percent). On the other hand, people in very densely populated areas (61 percent) were more worried about an escalation of the war in Eastern Europe than in very sparsely populated, rural regions (49 percent).
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