Ukrainian refugee women and children are evacuating to Moldova
The NGO Team Humanity is bringing aid to Ukraine and evacuating women and children out of the country.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Talks between Ukraine and Russia to stop fighting resumed as scheduled on Friday, as Ukrainian officials denied responsibility for a helicopter attack on a Russian oil depot.
Russian officials accused Ukraine of the strike Belgorod region. If confirmed, it would mark the first Ukrainian airstrike on Russian soil.
“Certainly, this is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of the talks,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, said the Russian claims do not “correspond with reality.”
Russia continued withdrawing some of its troops from around Ukraine’s capital Friday, though Ukrainian and Western officials have said Russian forces may be resupplying and shifting focus elsewhere.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday that its attempt to evacuate residents in the besieged port city Mariupol failed but they would try again Saturday.
“Today, our team tried to facilitate a safe passage out of Mariupol,” the ICRC said in a Twitter statement Friday. “But had to return to Zaporizhzhia after conditions made it impossible to proceed. We will try again tomorrow.”
The city remained closed for entry and was “very dangerous” for people trying to leave, said Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to the mayor of Mariupol. He added that Russian forces had been blocking humanitarian supplies since Thursday, according to Reuters.
In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people have made it out of Mariupol through humanitarian corridors, reducing the city’s population from 430,000 to 100,000 by last week.
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Latest developments:
► Negotiations to stop the fighting between Russia and Ukraine resumed Friday.
►Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy’s office said 86 Ukrainian service members were freed in the Zaporizhzhia region as part of a prisoner swap with Russia. The number of Russians released was not disclosed.
►Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 153 children have been killed and 245 injured, according to a Telegram post from Ukraine attorney general’s office on Friday. The most children have been injured in the Kyiv region.
► It will cost at least $10 billion to renew the Mariupol’s’ infrastructure due to damage caused by the war, the city council said in a Telegram post Friday. Mayor Vadim Boychenko said he would push for reparations from Russia to compensate for Mariupol and its citizens’ “suffering and damage.”
►Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree Thursday demanding payment for natural gas in rubles but appeared to temper the order by allowing dollar and euro payments through a designated bank
An attempt by humanitarian groups to remove civilians from the besieged port city of Mariupol failed Friday.
A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross was planning to enter Mariupol to deliver emergency humanitarian aid and begin evacuating residents but had to return to Zaporizhzhia.
The Mariupol city council said Friday that buses escorted by the Red Cross and State Emergency Service of Ukraine would take more than 2,000 citizens. The Russian military said it committed to a ceasefire between Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia.
But Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to the mayor of Mariupol, said Friday the city remained closed for entry and was “very dangerous” for people trying to leave, according to Reuters. He added that Russian forces had been blocking humanitarian supplies since Thursday.
“This effort has been and remains extremely complex,” the ICRC wrote Friday on Twitter.
Although the large effort on Friday failed, smaller groups have been able to leave the city via private transport, the New York Times reported, citing a statement from Iryna Vereshchuk, the deputy prime minister, on her Telegram page. Evacuees from Berdyansk and a few from Mariupol have been arriving at the registration center in Zaporizhzhia on private vehicles and buses carrying bags and pets, photos from the site show.
— Ella Lee and N’dea Yancey-Bragg
WHAT’S HAPPENING, AND WHERE: Mapping and tracking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
VISUALS: The devastation of Mariupol
Vyacheslav Gladkov, regional governor of Belgorod, wrote on Telegram on Friday that two Ukrainian helicopters conducted an airstrike late Thursday on the oil facility in Belgorod, about 21 miles from Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Gladkov first wrote that two oil workers were injured but later said there were no victims. And Rosneft, the Russian oil firm that owns the fuel depot, said in a separate statement that no one was hurt in the fire, according to Reuters.
Kyiv has denied any involvement in the attack.
“For some reason they say that we did it, but according to our information this does not correspond to reality,” Ukraine’s Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said on Ukrainian television.
Leaders in the European Union on Friday told Chinese President Xi Jinping that China would hurt its global reputation if it provides Russia with economic or military assistance.
“We called on China to end the war in Ukraine,” European Council President Charles Michel told reporters in Brussels after the meeting, according to the Washington Post. “China cannot turn a blind eye to Russia’s violation of international law.”
While China says it is not taking sides in the conflict, it has declared a “no limits” partnership with Moscow, has refused to condemn the invasion, opposes sanctions on Russia and routinely amplifies Russian disinformation about the conflict, including not referring to it as an invasion or a war in keeping with Russian practice.
American and European leaders aim to strike a difficult balance with China, both warning the nation over Ukraine and hoping to preserve a relationship.
Meanwhile earlier on Friday, China accused the United States of instigating the war in Ukraine, saying NATO should have been disbanded following the break-up of the Soviet Union.
“As the culprit and leading instigator of the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has led NATO to engage in five rounds of eastward expansion in the last two decades after 1999,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a daily briefing.
Lijian added that the number of NATO members increased from 16 to 30, moving eastward and “pushing Russia to the wall step by step.”
— Ella Lee
A collection of 16 American colleges, one with Ukrainian roots, plan to issue honorary degrees to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Manor College, a private Catholic institution in Pennsylvania founded by Ukrainian nuns in 1947, said Zelenskyy “exemplifies leadership through crisis and caring for his people worthy of the conferring of this degree,” according to a news release.
The other 15 colleges include Adrian College in Michigan, Bard College in New York, Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina and Shenandoah University in Virginia. The group is encouraging other universities “to join them in elevating the profile of President Zelenskyy’s heroism and his courageous efforts to protect western civilization.”
Manor College said the Honorary Consul of Ukraine in Philadelphia, Iryna Mazur, will accept the degree on Zelenskyy’s behalf.
Alfred University president Mark Zupan asked the Ukrainian embassy if Zelenskyy would be able to receive the degree by video, according to the Democrat & Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network. The embassy said no, given he is busy fighting a war.
— Chris Quintana
Russia and Ukraine resumed negotiations online Friday. Russian delegation head Vladimir Medinsky published a picture of the talks underway, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office confirmed to The Associated Press that the negotiations had resumed.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, said the alleged attack on the Russian fuel depot “cannot be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for continuing the talks,” Russian state media reported.
The two countries held face-to-face talks Tuesday in Turkey as the United Nations pressed for a cease-fire in Russia’s brutal invasion. The talks took place in the Turkish presidential office in Istanbul and lasted more than three hours, Russia’s Tass agency reported.
Tuesday negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough, leading President Joe Biden to pledge an additional $500 million in aid to Ukraine earlier this week.
— Celina Tebor
Marta Hulievska, a freshman student at Dartmouth College, has been organizing campus rallies to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine to keep her from reading the news and worrying about her family. Her mother, sisters and grandma were forced to flee to western Ukraine while her dad stayed behind in their hometown of Zaporizhzhia.
“You kind of enter like this alternative world where you’re not in America and you’re not in Ukraine, you’re like somewhere in between,” she said, describing her experience as “second-hand PTSD.”
An estimated 1,700 college and university students from Ukraine are living in the United States. Unsure if they’ll be able to return to Ukraine when their programs end, many are trying to find ways to stay in the country longer.
“It is really hard to be going through a crisis in your country when you’re not in your country,” said Sarah Ilchman, co-president of the Institute of International Education. “Maybe there are people at home who were going to pay for their tuition and that’s not there anymore.”
The IIE launched grants and scholarships to provide resources for students, Ilchman said. Campus offices are also facilitating emergency funding and offering mental health resources. Meanwhile, some institutions are helping students secure temporary protected status, which will shield them from deportation for the next 18 months. Read more here.
— N’dea Yancey-Bragg
Russian military troops departed the heavily contaminated Chernobyl nuclear power plant early Friday, handing control back to Ukrainians.
Moscow took control of Chernobyl over a month ago. According to Ukrainian officials, Russian troops destroyed a new laboratory at the plant working to improve management of radioactive waste that had “highly active samples and samples of radionuclides” last week.
Other reports indicated over 100 workers at the plant were stuck there for more than 12 days in early March after Russian forces seized it.
Ukraine’s state power company, Energoatom, said the Russian pullout at Chernobyl was due to soldiers receiving “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches in the forest in the exclusion zone around the closed plant. But there has been no independent confirmation of that.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian withdrawals from the north and center of the country were only military tactics.
In a Friday press conference, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael M. Grossi, said he had spoken with Ukrainian and Russian nuclear officials but they did not discuss reports of Russia’s troops experiencing radiation poisoning, according to the New York Times. Grossi added that radiation near the plant was “quite normal” but that there was a “relatively higher level of localized radiation because of the movement of heavy vehicles.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
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