Update on the situation on the ground
Several localities like Izium and Kreminna have fallen in the past two weeks, and the Russian army is still advancing, pocket by pocket. “The Russians are trying to advance towards the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk from the North and East”according to the UK Ministry of Defence.
In the Donbas region, “the enemy is carrying out strikes on the positions of our troops along the entire length of the front line with mortars, artillery and multiple rocket launchers”the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense pointed out yesterday on Telegram.
In the Luhansk region in particular, the town of Popasna continues to be shelled, with three dead found under the rubble of a collapsed building, Governor Serhi Haïdaï said on Tuesday.
And in the Donetsk region, at least two civilians were killed and six others injured in different localities, according to its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.
“We have a very fragmented front line, which does not follow a river, a road or a highway. Now it’s a village of ours, one of them, one of us, like on a chessboard.”, summarizes a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army. In a bombing in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, three people were killed and seven injured, two seriously, regional authorities said.
Two Russian missiles hit the city of Zaporizhia yesterday morning, killing at least one person and injuring one and hitting an (unspecified) business, according to the regional administration. Zaporizhia, a major industrial center on the Dnieper, to the south of which is also Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, has in recent weeks been the reception point for Ukrainian civilians fleeing the siege of Mariupol and other bombed cities. of Donbass.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said yesterday that this city was now preparing for an attack by Russian forces from the coast.
In Mariupol, almost entirely controlled by the Russians but where some 100,000 civilians are still trapped according to kyiv, the situation is still blocked.
Russian forces continue to shell the vast Azovstal metallurgical complex there, where the last Ukrainian fighters are entrenched with, according to them, nearly a thousand civilians, Governor Kyrylenko said on Tuesday.
The road and rail bridge spanning the Dniester estuary, linking the Odessa area to the Romanian border, was damaged by an attack and closed to traffic, according to an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior Anton Gerashchenko. “If it remains closed, access to the Odessa region will only be possible along the Moldovan border”he said on Twitter.
The level of radioactivity at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine is “in normal”said yesterday the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, during a visit, thirty-six years to the day after the worst nuclear disaster in history, in 1986. The occupation of this site, 150 kilometers north of kyiv, by the Russian army, between February 24 and the end of March, was “very, very dangerous”, he noted. There was a power cut there.
There is no overall civilian death toll. In Mariupol alone, the Ukrainian authorities speak of 20,000 dead, due to the fighting but also to the lack of food, water and electricity. On the military side, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that around 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict and some 10,000 of them injured.
The Kremlin recently admitted on its side “significant losses”. On March 25, he acknowledged the death of 1,351 soldiers for 8,825 wounded. Some Western sources estimate up to 12,000 the number of dead Russian soldiers.