Status: 03/12/2022 09:01 a.m
According to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, Russian soldiers have kidnapped the mayor of the city of Melitopol. In a video message, he calls for his release and calls the act a “sign of weakness”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for the release of the mayor of the Russian-held city of Melitopol. Pressure on mayors or their “physical elimination” will not help Russia take over Ukrainian cities, Zelenskyy said in a video address. Such an approach is a “sign of weakness” on the part of Russia. The procedure is the same as the actions of “IS terrorists”, according to Zelenskyj.
Moscow probably expected to find more support in Ukraine, Zelenskyy said. But they didn’t find any people who would simply hand over cities to them.
Separatists are looking for the mayor
Kyiv announced yesterday that the mayor of southern Ukraine’s Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, had been kidnapped. This could not be verified independently. A video fragment showed hooded people taking a man away from a central building. The city of Melitopol, located in the southern Ukrainian region of Zaporizhia, has around 150,000 inhabitants. Russian troops took the port city on February 26.
The prosecutor’s office in the Moscow-backed separatist region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine said on its website that there was a criminal case against Federov. He was charged with “terrorist activities” and financing a nationalist militia called the Right Sector to “perpetrate acts of terrorism against civilians in Donbass.” The prosecutor’s office said it was looking for Federow. Anyone with information about his whereabouts should get in touch.
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.
Appeal to mothers of Russian soldiers
Zelenskyj also called on Russian mothers, especially those of conscripts, to find out exactly where their sons are. You should not think that they are being sent on exercises. “Don’t send your children to war in a foreign country,” Zelensky said.
“Check where your son is. And if you have even the slightest suspicion that your son might be sent to war against Ukraine, act immediately” to prevent him from being killed or captured, he said the Ukrainian President. “Ukraine never wanted this terrible war,” added Zelenskyy. But his country will defend itself against the Russian attack.
Russia admitted to using conscripts in Ukraine for the first time on Wednesday. President Vladimir Putin has issued instructions to “categorically rule out” the use of conscripts, the Defense Ministry said. On Monday, Putin had assured that he would not send any conscripts or reservists to Ukraine and that only “professionals” would have the task of fulfilling the “set goals”.
Already in the first days of the Russian attack on Ukraine there were reports of the use of very young conscripts. Appeals from Russian mothers who had not heard from their sons who had been sent to Ukraine piled up on the Internet.