Status: 08.04.2022 07:30 a.m
The Russian army has apparently withdrawn from northern Ukraine – there it is becoming clear in more and more places how great the suffering of the civilians was. In Borodyanka it was “much more terrible” than in Bucha, declared President Zelenskyj.
According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, further atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine are expected. In the small town of Borodjanka near Kyiv, where clean-up work was underway and rescue workers removed rubble, it was “much more terrible” than in Bucha, he said in a video message. He did not give specific details.
conflicting parties as a source
In the current situation, information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by official bodies of the Russian and Ukrainian conflict parties cannot be directly checked by an independent body.
The images from another Kiev suburb, Bucha, where hundreds of bodies of residents were found on the streets after Russian troops withdrew, had caused international outrage. Ukraine blames Russian troops for the massacre. Moscow denies that.
In Borodyanka, 26 bodies were recovered from the rubble of two bombed-out houses alone, said Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova. It is currently difficult to estimate how many victims there were in total. According to earlier information from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, the city is said to have the highest number of victims in the Kyiv region. Venediktova now declared that every war crime and crime against humanity must and will be documented and those responsible punished. Sexual violence was also confirmed in Borodyanka.
Attacks on Ukraine shift east to Donbass region
Philipp Wundersee, WDR, daily news 09:00 a.m., April 8, 2022
Concern for Mariupol
In the video message, Zelenskyi also asked what would happen if the world found out what Russian units had done in the heavily contested port city of Mariupol. In “almost every street” there is what the world saw in Bucha and other cities in the Kyiv region after the Russian troops withdrew.
According to the Mariupol city administration, which was deployed by pro-Russian forces, around 5,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting there so far. The “new mayor” Konstantin Ivashchenko told the Russian state news agency TASS on Thursday in excerpts of an interview published in advance that “60 to 70 percent” of all apartments in the city had been destroyed or damaged. Ivashchenko also estimated that 250,000 people had left the city, but at least as many, if not as many as 300,000, were still in the city.
Ukraine, on the other hand, estimates that there are still 100,000 people in the city, where the humanitarian situation is catastrophic. The Ukrainian authorities had also estimated the number of civilian casualties at “tens of thousands” and the destruction at “90 percent”.
The Russian army has been besieging Mariupol for weeks and is facing fierce Ukrainian resistance. The capture is strategic for Russia as it would establish a land link between the Crimean Peninsula, annexed in 2014, and the separatist-controlled region in eastern Ukraine.
WHO criticizes attacks on health care
The World Health Organization (WHO) says it has verified more than 100 “attacks on healthcare” since the invasion began more than a month ago. At least 73 people were killed and 51 injured in at least 103 attacks on hospitals and other health facilities in the country, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday.
The number of victims includes both medical staff and patients. “We are outraged that attacks on health care (in Ukraine) continue,” he said.
Ukraine: No more Russian soldiers in Sumy region
Meanwhile, Russian troops appear to have almost completely withdrawn from northern Ukraine. According to Ukrainian sources, there are no longer any Russian troops in the north-eastern Ukrainian region of Sumy. The head of the regional administration, Dmytro Shyvytskyi, warned people that the region is not yet safe. There are still many mined areas that have not been searched for dangers. People should not drive on the side of the road, not use forest paths and not approach destroyed military equipment.
Along with the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions, the region was one of those areas in which Russian troops had attacked since the beginning of the war.
“Putin was wrong”
According to the US government, Russia has given up its goal of capturing the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. “Putin thought he could very quickly take over the country of Ukraine, very quickly take this capital. He was wrong,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Thursday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee in Congress.
However, six weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the future course of the war is still uncertain, stressed US Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley at the same hearing. “The first part of the war” was “probably conducted successfully” from the Ukrainian point of view, said Milley. “But in the south-east, in the Donbass region, where the Russians want to join forces and continue their attack, there is still a significant battle ahead.”
In addition, Ukraine will need different supplies of weapons than before for the fight in the southeast, such as tanks, because the terrain there is different from that in the north.