Lviv (Ukraine): Russian forces bombed and destroyed a bridge in the encircled city of Chernihiv, the region’s governor, Viacheslav Chaus, said.
The destroyed bridge had been used for evacuating civilians and delivering humanitarian aid. It crossed the Desna River and connected the city to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Chernihiv authorities said Tuesday that the encircled city has no water or electricity and called the situation there a humanitarian disaster.
Explosions and bursts of gunfire shook Kyiv Wednesday morning, and heavy artillery fire could be heard from the northwest, where Russian forces have sought to encircle and take the capital’s suburbs.
Lviv: Russian military forces destroyed a laboratory at the Chernobyl nuclear plant that worked to improve management of radioactive waste, the Ukrainian agency responsible for the Chernobyl exclusion zone said Tuesday.
The Russian military seized the decommissioned plant at the beginning of the war last month. The exclusion zone is the contaminated area around the plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear meltdown in 1986.
The state agency said the laboratory, built at a cost of 6 million euros with support from the European Commission, opened in 2015.
The laboratory contained “highly active samples and samples of radionuclides that are now in the hands of the enemy, which we hope will harm itself and not the civilized world,” the agency said in its statement.
Radionuclides are unstable atoms of chemical elements that release radiation..
Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency said Monday that radiation monitors around the plant had stopped working.
Washington: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has denied that Russia’s invasion has stalled.
Asked on CNN what Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved in Ukraine, he said: “Well, first of all not yet. He hasn’t achieved yet.” But he insisted the military operation was going “strictly in accordance with the plans and purposes that were established beforehand”.
Peskov reiterated that Putin’s main goals were to “get rid of the military potential of Ukraine” and “ensure that Ukraine changes from an anti-Russian centre to a neutral country.”