Several loud explosions rocked the center of the Ukrainian capital Monday, a week after Russia orchestrated a massive, coordinated air strike across the country.
Kyiv city mayor Vitali Klichko said the central Shevchenko district of the capital had been hit, and urged residents to take shelter. The early morning explosions sparked a fire in a non-residential building and damaged several apartment blocks, Klichko said in his Telegram channel. No further details were immediately known. There was no word yet on casualties.
The explosions came from the same central Kyiv district where a week ago a missile struck a children’s playground and intersection near the Kyiv National University’s main buildings.
Social media posts showed a fire in the area of the apparent strike, with black smoke rising into the early morning light.
Russian forces struck Kyiv with Iranian Shahed drones, wrote Andrii Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, in a post on the Telegram social media site. Russia has repeatedly been using the so-called suicide drones in recent weeks to target urban centers and infrastructure, including power stations.
Strikes in central Kyiv became a rarity in the last several months after Russian forces failed to capture the capital in the beginning of the war. Last week’s early morning strikes were the first explosions heard in Kyiv’s city center in several months, and put Kyiv as well as the rest of the country back on edge as the war nears nine months. Monday’s blasts seemed to continue what many fear could become more common occurrences in urban centers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week’s strikes were in retaliation for the bombing of a bridge connecting the Crimean peninsula with the Russian mainland. Putin blames Ukraine for masterminding the blast, which suspended traffic over the bridge and curtailed Moscow’s ability to use the bridge to supply Russian troops in the occupied regions of southern Ukraine.
The strike on Kyiv comes as fighting has intensified in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in recent days, as well as the continued Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south near Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last night in his evening address that there was heavy fighting around the cities of Bakhmut and Soledar in the Donetsk region. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions make up the bulk of the industrial east known as the Donbas, and were two of four regions annexed by Russia in September in defiance of international law.
On Sunday, the Russian-backed regime in the Donetsk region said Ukraine had shelled its central administrative building in a direct hit. No casualties were reported.
A senior official at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been kidnapped by Russian forces, the Ukrainian state nuclear energy operator said Tuesday.
Valeriy Martyniuk, the plant’s deputy director general for human resources, was abducted on Monday from the Russian-occupied plant, Energoatom wrote on Telegram.
“[They] keep holding him at an unknown location and probably using methods of torture and intimidation,” the nuclear operator said.
Situated in southeastern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia (ZNPP) is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Although it has been occupied by Russian forces since March, the plant is still run by Ukrainian staff.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government to take control of the plant, a plan that was summarily rejected by Energoatom head Petro Kotin.
Martyniuk’s alleged abduction comes after the detention of ZNPP’s chief Ihor Murashov on Oct. 1. Murashov was released after two days, and has not returned to his job at the plant.
In their Tuesday post, Energoatom called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi to “take all possible measures” for Martyniuk’s return.
“The arbitrariness of the invaders at Zaporizhzhya NPP must be stopped as soon as possible!” the company wrote.
IAEA did not immediately respond to the call to action. Grossi is scheduled to meet with Putin on Tuesday to discuss the possibility of a demilitarized zone around the power plant.
Reports of Martyniuk’s kidnapping also follow growing concern for the region around the plant, which has been bombarded by “kamikaze” drones for several weeks.
“The occupier uses all available weapons against the civilian residents of the region,” Oleksandr Starukh, the provincial governor, wrote on Telegram last week.
“Missiles, anti-aircraft guns, artillery, and now also so-called kamikaze drones. Be attentive!”
Zaporizhzhia, along with Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson, was annexed by Putin last month after a Kremlin-backed referendum in all four regions. Officials in the West have widely dismissed the proceedings as sham elections.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded by signing a law ruling out peace talks with Putin.
“He does not know what dignity and honesty are,” Zelensky said at the time.
“Therefore, we are ready for a dialog with Russia, but with another president of Russia.”
“We must speak with prudence when commenting on such matters,” Macron told reporters at a European Union summit in Prague on Friday.
“I have always refused to engage in political fiction, and especially … when speaking of nuclear weapons,” he added. “On this issue, we must be very careful.”
Biden made his remarks about the potential end of the world during a Democratic fundraising event on Thursday
Vladimir Putin was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.” Biden said. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tamped down the armageddon talk Friday and instead looked to place the blame back on Russia and Vladimir Putin — who has repeatedly raised the prospect of utilizing his country’s nuclear arsenal.
“Russia’s talk of using nuclear weapons is irresponsible and there’s no way to use them without unintended consequences. It cannot happen,” Jean-Pierre said.
Russian forces killed 20 people, including 10 children, in a close-range attack on a six-car convoy of civilian vehicles fleeing southeastern Ukraine Saturday, according to reports.
The strike followed another missile hit on a different convoy in Zaporizhzhia province on Friday, which resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians.
Oleh Vasylovych Synyehubov, the Ukraine governor of Kharkiv Oblast, said that the 20 civilians were killed when the Russians shelled the convoy in Kupyansk, an important railroad junction in the province.
Photos showed wreckage of vehicles and civilian bodies found at the site, according to a report from the Security Service of Ukraine posted on the Telegram app Saturday.
The report said the convoy was traveling in a so-called “grey zone” between occupied Svatov in the Luhansk region and liberated Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region.
“A brutal attack on civilians was carried out by a sabotage and reconnaissance group of the occupiers – they shot six old cars and one Gazelle truck at close range with small arms,” said Vasyl Malyuk, acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service.
“The enemy once again proved that his goal is the destruction of all Ukrainians, regardless of age and gender,” Malyuk continued. “The occupiers are defeated on the battlefield and out of desperation respond to them by killing civilians.”
The Security Service said it is investigating the attack as a war crime.
Russian men flocked to border crossings with Finland, Georgia, and other neighboring nations Saturday, waiting in long lines to flee President Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization” draft as military officers went door-to-door in Russia’s hinterlands to call up the reluctant troops.
The exodus — which reportedly resulted in a quarter-mile-long line of cars at the Vaalimaa border crossing point in southeast Finland and a 2,000-vehicle traffic jam at Georgia’s Verkhny Lars checkpoint — came as Putin amended Russia’s criminal code, decreeing 10-year jail terms for those refusing to participate in combat operations.
“It is just insane,” said Nikita, a 27-year-old Russian waiting tearfully at the Finnish border. “All my friends (are) in danger … I am just for freedom.”
The mad dash came three days after Putin ordered the call-up of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine during a national address that included a veiled threat to deploy the country’s nuclear arsenal against the US.
But the order sparked mass protests across Russia, resulting in nearly 1,500 arrests, in part because of a lesser-acknowledged paragraph in the decree that said up to 1 million recruits could be mustered.
Demonstrations continued to flare Saturday as word of botched conscription orders spread throughout Russia.
In rural Buryatia, officials arrived at the door of the long-dead Alexander Bezdorozhny with papers ordering him to report for military duty.
Bezdorozhny died at age 40 in November 2020, nearly two years ago, after battling a chronic lung condition. He had never served in the Russian armed forces.
The conscription orders for Bezdorozhny indicated that local officials are ignoring Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s promise that only military reservists with combat experience or specialized skills would be subject to the draft.
“There’s nothing partial about the mobilization in Buryatia,” said Alexandra Garmazhapova of the Free Buryatia Foundation, who estimated that up to 5,000 men in the region were caught up in the first wave of draft orders. “They are taking everyone.”
Garmazhapova accused the Kremlin of disproportionately grabbing its conscripts from out-of-the-way portions of the massive country in an attempt to tamp down the backlash in Russia’s urban centers.
“The federal center is trying not to touch St Petersburg and Moscow, because in Moscow you can have protests against the Kremlin,” she said.
The head of the Sakha Republic, which borders the Arctic Ocean in Russia’s remote east, acknowledged Saturday that ineligible men, including fathers of young children, had been drafted improperly.
“All those who were mobilized by mistake should be returned,” Aisen Nikolaev wrote on Telegram. “That work has already begun.”
But neither the reassurances nor the mass arrests brought the protests to a halt Saturday.
Riot police moved in on scores of demonstrators in Novosibirsk, detaining them as they linked hands and sang, BBC video showed, while girls as young as 14 were arrested in St. Petersburg, Sky News reported. Meanwhile, in the city of Omsk, video obtained by Reuters showed conscripts brawling with police who were attempting to force them onto buses.
More than 700 protesters were arrested Saturday, according to the OVD-Info human rights group.
Ukrainians are once again anxious and alarmed about the fate of a nuclear power plant in a land that was home to the world’s worst atomic accident in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, has been occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the war, and continued fighting near the facility has heightened fears of a catastrophe that could affect nearby towns in southern Ukraine — or potentially an even wider region.
The government in Kyiv alleges Russia is essentially holding the Soviet-era nuclear plant hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it, while Moscow accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility, which is located in the city of Enerhodar.
“Anybody who understands nuclear safety issues has been trembling for the last six months,” said Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear plants during the war because it is heavily reliant on them, and its 15 reactors at four stations provide about half of its electricity. Still, an ongoing conflict near a working atomic plant is troubling for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to a disaster.
That fear is palpable just across the Dnieper River in Nikopol, where residents have been under nearly constant Russian shelling since July 12, with eight people killed, 850 buildings damaged and over the half the population of 100,000 fleeing the city.
Liudmyla Shyshkina, a 74-year-old widow who lived within sight of the Zaporizhzhia plant before her apartment was bombarded and her husband killed, said she believes the Russians are capable of intentionally causing a nuclear disaster.
Fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant’s training complex, which officials said did not result in the release of any radiation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia’s military actions there amount to “nuclear blackmail.”
No civilian nuclear plant is designed for a wartime situation, although the buildings housing Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors are protected by reinforced concrete that could withstand an errant shell, experts say.
The more immediate concern is that a disruption of electricity supply to the plant could knock out cooling systems that are essential for the safe operation of the reactors, and emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable. The pools where spent fuel rods are kept to be cooled also are vulnerable to shelling, which could cause the release of radioactive material.
Kyiv told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, disrupting electricity supplies to the Zaporizhzhia plant for several hours.
“These incidents show why the IAEA must be able to send a mission to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant very soon,” said the agency’s head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, adding that he expected that to happen “within the next few days, if ongoing negotiations succeed.”
At a U.N. Security Council meeting Tuesday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the withdrawal of all military personnel and equipment from the plant and an agreement on a demilitarized zone around it.
Currently only one of the plant’s four power lines connecting it to the grid is operational, the agency said. External power is essential not just to cool the two reactors still in operation but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities onsite.
“If we lose the last one, we are at the total mercy of emergency power generators,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California.
He and Schneider expressed concern that the occupation of the plant by Russian forces is also hampering safety inspections and the replacement of critical parts, and is putting severe strain on hundreds of Ukrainian staff who operate the facility.
“Human error probability will be increased manifold by fatigue,” said Meshkati, who was part of a committee appointed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to identify lessons from the 2011 nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. “Fatigue and stress are unfortunately two big safety factors.”
If an incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant were to release significant amounts of radiation, the scale and location of the contamination would be determined largely by the weather, said Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised the British and Irish governments.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant destroyed cooling systems which triggered meltdowns in three of its reactors. Much of the contaminated material was blown out to sea, limiting the damage.
The April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant north of Kyiv sent a cloud of radioactive material across a wide swath of Europe and beyond. In addition to fueling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians.
Zaporizhzhia’s reactors are of a different model than those at Chernobyl, but unfavorable winds could still spread radioactive contamination in any direction, Dorfman said.
“If something really went wrong, then we have a full-scale radiological catastrophe that could reach Europe, go as far as the Middle East, and certainly could reach Russia, but the most significant contamination would be in the immediate area,” he said.
That’s why Nikopol’s emergency services department takes radiation measurements every hour since the Russian invasion began. Before that, it was every four hours.
Kyiv reported some 9,000 troops killed in action since February, a grim milestone as the Russian invasion reaches its six-month anniversary.
Kyiv’s military chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, referenced the figure at a veterans event on Monday, saying Ukraine’s children must be cared for because “their father went to the front line and, perhaps, is one of those almost 9,000 heroes who died.”
The statement — the first official death toll from Kyiv since the fighting began — is a rare look into the cost of a war that has been hard to quantify. The United Nations has routinely reported civilian casualty figures, most recently reporting 5,587 non-combatants killed.
But in a war where Russian strategy has involved encircling and shelling cities, the UN has pointed out that access is limited, confirmation of deaths is difficult, and their numbers are almost certainly “considerably higher.”
Russia’s casualty figures have been a mystery for most of the war.
The Kremlin stopped publicly announcing casualty figures in March, after stating that 1,351 soldiers had been killed in a month of the war.
That figure, which was not widely regarded as accurate at the time, remains the last official accounting of Russia’s war losses.
US intelligence earlier this month estimated that some 70,000 to 80,000 Russian troops had been killed or wounded since the fighting began.
Last month, CIA director William Burns said as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed — roughly as many men as Russia is thought to have lost in its failed ten-year bid to takeover Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the war continues to be fought by inches, with Russia’s push for the eastern Donbas region effectively paused and a long-expected Ukrainian counterattack in the south near Kherson yet to materialize.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged blame for the shelling around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant Saturday amid growing fears of a nuclear catastrophe.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly blamed the Russians, who seized the nuclear compound at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine in March. They accuse Russian forces of storing heavy weaponry inside the plant and using it as cover to launch attacks, calculating that Ukrainian troops would not risk firing at the plant’s six reactors, according to CNN.
Moscow, meanwhile, has said that Ukrainian forces are targeting the site.
Amid widening reports Saturday that Russia was planning a “false flag” operation intended to make an attack appear to come from Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for Russians to be held to account for the unprecedented actions around the nuclear plant.
“Every day the stay of the Russian contingent in the territory of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant and in the nearby areas increases the radiation threat to Europe, so much that even in the peak moments of confrontation during the Cold War there was no such thing,” Zelensky posted on Facebook.
He called for Russian officials to be “held accountable in an international court,” adding: “Every Russian military who either shoots at the station or shoots at the station undercover should understand what is becoming a special target for our intelligence and intelligence services, for our army.”
The United Nations secretary general on Thursday called on both sides to end military activities near the power station. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that parts of the plant had been damaged in the fighting and called for an immediate inspection by international observers.
Video posted to Twitter Saturday showed vehicles lined up for miles as thousands of residents near the plant attempted to flee the fighting and a potential nuclear accident.
When Tony Garnett and his longtime partner Lorna decided to take in a displaced Ukrainian, they had no idea that it would be the end of their family.
But Tony and refugee Sofiia Karkadym, who moved in with the couple and their two young children on May 4, quickly bonded through the language of love — him speaking Slovakian and her cooing back in Ukrainian.
Before long, it went beyond talk. Sofiia reportedly took to sashaying around the house in red lipstick and low-cut tops, always sure to get dolled up right around the time when Tony arrived home from his job as a security guard, according to the Sun.
Within days, Sofiia, 22, and Tony, 29, were going to the gym together or retiring to his car for intimate chats.
During one of their tête-à-têtes, Sofiia made clear that she had a high opinion of her host. As Tony told the Sun, “She told me privately, ‘Lorna is lucky to have you.’”
But a friend from the block who spotted them told Lorna, who Tony was with for 10 years, to beware. “My neighbor came over to see me and said she was concerned,” Lorna told the Sun. “She said they’d been a little touchy-feely and she didn’t like the look of it.”
Inside the couple’s home, where their two children were made to share a room in order to create space for Sofiia, the East-meets-West alliance was getting friendlier by the day.
“We were finding excuses to touch and brush against each other,” Tony acknowledged. “It was very flirtatious.”
Lorna could stand only so much. “It caused arguments; I can understand that,” Tony admitted. “When I got in at night, Sofiia would be the one who made a meal for me to try.”
Recalling that Lorna became increasingly jealous, Tony stated that she had “major arguments with Sofiia, asking her why she was with me all the time.” She’d ask Sofiia, “Why are you following him around?”
Within days of their guest’s arrival, Tony said, “Sofia told me she didn’t know whether she could continue to live with us under these circumstances.”
No doubt, Lorna had similar concerns: “I started to feel like the third wheel as they sat on the sofa, laughing and joking while I was ignored. I suddenly felt unwelcome in my own home.”
Adding insult to injury: The couple’s two kids, six and three, followed their dad’s lead and took a shine to Sofiia.
Ironically, all of this began out of what Tony called a desire “to do the right thing.” He and Lorna had placed their contact details on Facebook, offering a room in their home to a Ukrainian refugee. As kismet would have it, Sofiia was first to respond.
“I decided it was the right thing to do, to put a roof over someone’s head and help them when they were in desperate need,” Lorna said.
She did not expect the neediness to include Sofiia, an IT manager in her home country, taking liberties with Tony. While Sofiia insists that things did not start out that way, Lorna sees it differently. She maintains that the blond-haired charmer “set her sights on Anthony from the start, decided she wanted him.”
And Tony pretty much agrees: “We clicked right from the start. It was something neither of us could stop.”
Nevertheless, Lorna, at the end of her rope after 10 days of shameless flirtations and more, finally exploded on May 14.
“Seeing we were becoming close was just too much,” said Tony. “It came to a head when [Lorna] really went at Sofiia, yelling at her, using harsh language that left her in tears. [Sofiia] said she didn’t feel she could stay under our roof anymore and something inside me clicked.”
Unable to sublimate his strong feelings, Tony told his soon-to-be-former girlfriend, “If she’s going, I’m going.”
He added to the Sun: “I knew I couldn’t give it up and all of a sudden it seemed like a no-brainer. We both packed our bags and moved into my mum and dad’s home together.”
The whole thing has left Lorna miffed. “They barely know each other,” she said after Tony split. “It’s crazy. He’s walked out for a woman he’s known for 10 days. Until she arrived, we were a normal happy family.”
From the perspective of Sofiia, however, Lorna only has herself to blame for the bust-up: “Her constant suspicion, the tension, it just pushed me and Tony closer together. She created this situation by constantly suggesting something was going on when it wasn’t. So this is her fault … I’m not a home-wrecker.”
But even Tony’s parents might disagree with that assessment. While they initially allowed the couple to share a bed in their home, the elder Garretts appear to have developed second thoughts.
According to the Sun, Tony and Sofiia were “turfed out” after their story went viral. “The s–t has really hit the fan,” said Tony, who, ironically, is now a bit of a refugee himself, as he seeks a new place to live. “We know people are upset but we couldn’t fight it.”
Most upset of all, it seems, is Lorna. “Everything I knew has been turned on its head in the space of two weeks,” fumed the jilted girlfriend. Speaking of Sofiia, Lorna insisted, “She didn’t care about the devastation that was left behind.”
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