All Russian troops remaining around kyiv and the town of Chernigov in northern Ukraine have withdrawn from those areas, a senior US Department of Defense official said Wednesday.
In a call with journalists, the official indicated that, according to the data available to him, all the Russian soldiers deployed in those areas have withdrawn to go to Belarus and Russia in order to “reconsolidate and readjust”.
“We are not seeing Russian forces in and around kyiv or north of kyiv, nor in or around Chernigov,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the US has not detected “real changes” in the situation in eastern or southern Ukraine.
“Mariupol is still isolated, but the Russians have not secured it despite open source reports to the contrary, of the Ukrainians handing over Mariupol, we assess that this has not happened,” the US official said.
One of the advisers to the Ukrainian Presidency, Oleksiy Arestovych, assured on Wednesday that the Russians have lost part of their offensive potential and that they are now staffing and redeploying their troops in an attempt to continue the offensive on besieged Mariupol, in the south, and in the Kharkov region.
“In the rest of the sectors of the front, the enemy has been stopped, especially in the kyiv, Sumy regions and in almost the entire Chernigov area”, which until now had been heavily punished by the Russian Army since it invaded the country. on February 24, the advisor specified.
The US and the Ukrainian military authorities maintain that Russia wants to redirect its offensive starting now in eastern Ukraine to control the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, the self-proclaimed independent republics recognized by Russia, which controls them de facto.
At least 1,480 Ukrainian civilians have died in their country since the Russian invasion began until April 4, according to the latest data from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which also records 2,195 wounded.
