The situation – Lviv continues to be under heavy shelling

Dusseldorf According to Ukrainian sources, Russia continued its attacks on several cities. According to the governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksandr Pavlyuk, Russian troops took the town of Slavutich near the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant at the second attempt. In Slavutich on the border with Belarus live employees of the nuclear plant, which itself has been under Russian control for some time. The reports could not initially be verified.

Street fighting also continued in the port city of Mariupol, which is important for grain exports. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky compared the destruction to that in Syria’s Aleppo and warned of the consequences for the world: “Lack of Ukrainian exports will hit countries around the world.” Ukraine is one of the world’s largest grain producers.

According to Governor Maksim Kositsky, two rockets landed in Lviv in western Ukraine. Five people were injured. He had previously announced that there had been three heavy explosions on the eastern outskirts of the city. Reuters eyewitnesses reported a plume of heavy black smoke over northeastern Lviv.

The city, around 80 kilometers from the border with NATO country Poland, has only experienced a few attacks so far. However, around 200,000 refugees from other parts of Ukraine are staying there. A massive Russian airstrike hit the Yavoriv military training area near Lviv on March 13, killing 35 people according to Ukrainian sources. In Yavoriv, ​​Ukrainian soldiers had trained with Western instructors in recent years.

According to Mayor Vladislav Atroschenko, 44 ​​seriously injured people in Chernihiv, including three children, cannot be taken away for medical treatment because the city in the north of the country is now surrounded by Russian troops.

Curfew in Kyiv again

Vice Prime Minister Irina Wereschuk said on Ukrainian television that civilians should once again be able to leave cities via escape corridors. According to an agreement, civilians from the port city of Mariupol, which was particularly under Russian fire, should flee in private cars because Russian forces would not let buses pass, she said.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko ordered another curfew for Kyiv from Saturday evening. This applies from Saturday evening and until Monday morning. People are only allowed to leave their homes during this time to seek shelter from air and artillery attacks.

According to the British Ministry of Defence, Russia is not letting up its attacks on large Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol. In doing so, Russia is “relying on the indiscriminate use of air and artillery bombardments to try to demoralize the defense forces,” the British ministry said on Twitter.

According to Ukrainian information, ten humanitarian corridors were set up for Saturday to enable civilians to flee from particularly hard-fought regions. The corridors are in the outskirts of Kiev and in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk. However, there is no centralized evacuation by bus from the badly damaged port city of Mariupol, said Deputy Prime Minister Irina Wereshchuk, according to the Union agency.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday evening a humanitarian action with Turkey and Greece to save people from Mariupol at short notice. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky describes the situation there as “absolutely tragic”. So far it has been possible to get a little more than 26,000 civilians out of the city this week.

Energy embargo – will Germany buckle?

At a summit meeting in Brussels, NATO and the European Union tried to find a unified response to Russia’s war of aggression. However, the EU was unable to reach agreement on an immediate ban on imports of gas, oil or coal from Russia on Friday – also because of resistance from the federal government, which fears dramatic economic damage in its own country. Germany and the other EU countries have to pay hundreds of millions of euros to Russia every day for energy supplies.

Former Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) put pressure on the “Welt am Sonntag” to stop imports of Russian gas and oil. The CDU foreign politician Norbert Röttgen also expects that the federal government will soon give in.

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At the summit on Friday evening in Brussels, the EU states initially only agreed to buy gas on the world market with joint market power in order to gradually become independent of Russia. In addition, Western states rely on individual actions to help Ukraine. Great Britain imposed new sanctions on people and companies in Russia.

Demonstrations against the war are planned for Saturday in Germany.

Ukrainian Prime Minister asks for help

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal asked all mayors worldwide for humanitarian aid. At the same time, on Friday evening he appealed to all international partners to support the later reconstruction of his country. Schmyhal had already estimated the damage to the Ukrainian economy from the war at almost 515 billion euros in mid-March. Again, these figures cannot be independently verified.

Meanwhile, President Zelensky has called on the Gulf States to increase oil production. They should compensate for the decline in oil supplies from Russia, demanded Zelensky, who joined the video on Saturday at the Doha Forum in Qatar. Because of the Russian war in Ukraine, many countries are reducing their oil imports from Russia or want to boycott them entirely.

Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan also attended the conference. The country is the world’s largest oil exporter and has so far said it will stick to the production levels agreed with Russia and other oil-producing countries.

Qatar’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi dampened expectations of the desert state. He doesn’t think Qatar can help immediately: nobody can replace the Russian supplies at the moment.

More than two million refugees have arrived in Poland

Since the Russian attack began around a month ago, the federal police have registered 259,980 refugees from Ukraine in Germany. The Federal Ministry of the Interior announced this on Twitter on Saturday. The actual number of refugees is unknown because there are no comprehensive border controls – it is likely to be significantly higher. It is also not recorded how many people travel from Germany to other countries.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Saturday that Poland did not want to distribute refugees from Ukraine to other countries. “We will not try to distribute. If someone wants to stay with us, they can stay, if someone wants to travel further, they travel further,” Morawiecki said on Saturday on the sidelines of US President Joe Biden’s visit to Warsaw. Poland is currently negotiating with other countries’ heads of state and government on how they can support Poles in helping Ukrainians, Morawiecki said.

According to the border guards, 2.27 million refugees from the neighboring country have arrived in Poland since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. The agency announced this on Twitter on Saturday. On Friday alone there were around 30,500 people. This is a decrease of 6.4 percent compared to the previous day. According to the United Nations, a total of 3.7 million people have left Ukraine since the war began on February 24.

With agency material.

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