Russia bombards Chernihiv hours after pledging to halt shelling

 

Russian shells have bombarded the besieged Ukrainian city of Chernihiv overnight, its mayor has said, just hours after the Kremlin claimed it would halt attacks there and in Kyiv out of respect for ongoing peace talks.

Vladyslav Atroshenko said the Russians had lied and were continuing to indiscriminately attack the encircled city, which is less than 100 miles north of the country’s capital.

Authorities in Chernihiv estimate that about 400 people have died since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February, with civilians living now without electricity, gas or water.

Atroshenko said: “The night was just as we expected, that [everything Russia promised] is a lie from the beginning till the end, that’s why at night we had some serious shelling at night. And the Russians were trying to destroy all possible means of crossing Desna River towards Kyiv.”

Russia’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said on Tuesday during talks in Istanbul that Moscow wanted to “increase mutual trust, create the right conditions for future negotiations and reach the final aim of signing a peace deal with Ukraine”, and that the Kremlin would “radically reduce military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv”.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, responded that while there had been “positive” signals from the latest talks “they do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells”. “The enemy is still in our territory,” he said. “The shelling of our cities continues. Mariupol is blocked. Missile and airstrikes do not stop. This is the reality. These are the facts.”

Atroshenko, who has called for Kyiv not to swap captured pilots who had operated above Chernihiv for Ukrainian prisoners of war, said there had been no evidence any withdrawal over the last 24 hours from around his city.

He said: “The locals live in a real humanitarian crisis for weeks with no electricity, no heating, no water, only in some areas of the city there’s gas [natural gas, not petrol]. Thousands of buildings are destroyed. Yesterday our district, Liotka, was shelled especially heavily, where a few people died and dozens were injured.

“Have you ever met liars in your life? What stands behind their lies? They are just liars. They lie all the time! [Sergei] Lavrov [the Russian foreign minister] lies that this is just an ‘operation’, Russian military lies when they say that this ‘operation’ is against the armed forces of Ukraine, and we say that they purposefully are destroying civilians, they purposefully dropping bombs on civilians in broad daylight at low heights, they are bombing us with 120mm mines and you know this is not a precise weapons, its just bombing the entire city.”

Britain’s deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, said the claims from the Kremlin had to be treated with caution.

He said: “We judge the Russian military machine by its actions, not its words. There is obviously scepticism that it will regroup to attack again.

“The door to diplomacy will always be left ajar but I don’t think you can trust what is coming out of the mouth of [Vladimir] Putin’s war machine.”

Ukraine’s general staff of the armed forces has said that while Russian troops were partly withdrawing, it appeared to be merely “a rotation of individual units” and that Moscow was seeking to “mislead the military leadership” of Ukraine.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he had not seen anything indicating that talks were progressing in a “constructive way” and suggested Russian indications of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to “deceive people and deflect attention”.

Speaking on a visit to Morocco, Blinken said there was “what Russia says, and what Russia does, and we’re focused on the latter. What Russia is doing is the continued brutalisation of Ukraine.”

Ukraine presented Russian negotiators in Istanbul with a framework for peace under which it would remain neutral with its security guaranteed by third-party countries including the US, the UK, France, Turkey, China and Poland, in an arrangement similar to Nato’s article 5, which commits members to defend one another.

It also said it would be willing to agree to a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, with both countries agreeing not to use their militaries to resolve the issue in the meantime, and called for Russia to drop its objection to Ukrainian membership of the EU.