The death toll from a missile strike on the train station in Ukraine’s Kramatorsk has risen to 57 people, Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Sunday. The announcement comes after Russian forces retreated from the Ukrainian capital’s surroundings, finally allowing emergency workers access to the formerly occupied areas. Read about the day’s events as they unfolded on our live blog. All times are Paris time [GMT+2].
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April 11, 2:30am: Chechen chief Kadyrov says Russian forces will take Kyiv
Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful head of Russia’s republic of Chechnya, said early on Monday that there will be an offensive by Russian forces not only on the besieged port of Mariupol, but also on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
“There will be an offensive ... not only on Mariupol, but also on other places, cities and villages,” Kadyrov said in a video posted on his Telegram channel.
“Luhansk and Donetsk – we will fully liberate in the first place ... and then take Kyiv and all other cities.”
10:31pm: Powerful blasts heard in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Mykolaiv
A series of powerful explosions have been heard in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv and in Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea in the southern part of the country, Ukrainian media reported Sunday evening.
10:23 pm: Almost 3,000 Ukrainians evacuated Sunday
A total of 2,824 people were evacuated from Ukrainian cities through humanitarian corridors on Sunday, including 213 residents of the besieged southern port of Mariupol, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in an online post.
10:01pm: Ukraine’s GDP forecast to contract 45.1%, Russia 11.2% in 2022
Ukraine's economy will collapse by 45.1 percent this year due to the invasion by Russia, which will see its own GDP shrink 11.2 percent, the World Bank said in new forecasts published on Sunday.
9:27pm: At least 10 civilians killed in weekend strikes in east
Strikes in eastern Ukraine on Saturday killed at least 10 civilians and wounded 11 others, the region’s governor Oleg Synegubov said in a post on Telegram on Sunday, adding that one of those killed was a child.
“In the course of the day, the occupiers bombarded the civil infrastructure at Balakliya, Pesochin, Zolochiv and Dergachi,” he wrote.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, had a population of around 1.5 million before the war.
8:01pm: Death toll from Kramatorsk missile strike rises
The death toll from a missile strike on the train station in Ukraine’s Kramatorsk has risen to 57 people, Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Sunday.
Kyrylenko said 109 people were wounded in the attack, which Ukraine has blamed on Russia. The Russian Defence Ministry on Friday initially said it had used high-precision rockets to attack three railway stations in Donbas that it claimed housed Ukrainian reserves’ weapons and military equipment, but later moved to deny any involvement, saying the missile was Ukrainian.
7:56pm: Russians in Germany take to streets to protest anti-Russian discrimination
Around 800 people descended on the German city of Frankfurt on Sunday amid a sea of Russian flags to protest against the “hatred and harassment” they say they have suffered since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Germany is home to 1.2 million people of Russian origin and 325,000 from Ukraine. Authorities fear the conflict could be imported into Germany and the protests used to promote Moscow’s war narrative.
Police have so far recorded 383 anti-Russian offences and 181 anti-Ukrainian offences since the Kremlin’s invasion started on February 24.
6:50pm: Chernobyl situation far from normal, IAEA says
Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that the staff at its decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant has been rotated for the first time in three weeks after Russian troops left the area.
It said the situation remains far from normal, however, and that the staff had to be transported to and from the site by water, with the Pripyat River being the only way for people living in the city of Slavutych to currently reach the plant.
The IAEA said it had been informed that analytical laboratories for radiation monitoring at the site were destroyed, with analytical instruments “stolen, broken or otherwise disabled". The automated transmission of radiation monitoring data has been disabled.
6:41pm: Austrian chancellor to meet Putin in Moscow on Monday
Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday, the first European leader to meet him since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
“He is going there, having informed Berlin, Brussels and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky” to encourage dialogue, said a spokesman for Nehammer, who was in Ukraine on Saturday.
4:31pm: Biden, Modi to meet virtually following India’s ‘shaky’ response on Ukraine
US President Joe Biden will meet virtually Monday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, weeks after Biden said India has been “shaky” in its response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Biden will use the talks to continue “close consultations on the consequences of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine and mitigating its destabilising impact on global food supply and commodity markets", his spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said in a statement Sunday.
India has so far refused to join the votes condemning Moscow at the United Nations General Assembly, while saying it was deeply disturbed by the alleged killings of civilians by Russian troops in the town of Bucha in Ukraine.
According to experts, Russia is India’s biggest supplier of major arms and India is Russia’s largest customer.
4:15pm: Russia applies new war tactics
Sunday’s attack on Ukraine’s Dnipro airport is part of Russia’s new war tactics, FRANCE 24’s Foreign Affairs Editor Rob Parsons explains in the report below, noting also that Moscow’s recent appointment of Alexander Dvornikov as its new war general underscores Russia's ambitions to concentrate command.
3:46pm: More than 1,200 bodies found in Kyiv region, prosecutor says
Ukraine’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova on Sunday told Britain’s Sky News that “we have actually now, only for this morning, 1,222 dead people only in Kyiv region”.
She did not specify whether the number referred only to civilians, or whether it included killed Ukrainian fighters too. A week ago, Venediktova said 410 civilians had been found dead in areas near Kyiv which had been occupied by Russian troops.
3:40pm: 2,200 Ukrainian men detained for trying to leave the country
Ukraine’s border guard agency says that about 2,200 Ukrainian men of fighting age have been detained so far while trying to leave the country in violation of martial law.
The agency said Sunday that some of them have used forged documents and others tried to bribe border guards to get out of the country. It said some have been found dead while trying to cross the Carpathian mountains in adverse weather, without specifying the number.
Under martial law, Ukrainian men between 18 and 60 are barred from leaving the country so that they can be called up to fight.
2:49pm: Russian rockets destroy Dnipro airport
Russian forces fired rockets into Ukraine’s Luhansk and Dnipro regions on Sunday, Ukrainian officials said, completely destroying an airport and potentially leaving casualties.
“The airport itself was destroyed, as well as nearby infrastructure. And the rockets fly and fly,” Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the central Dnipropetrovsk region, said.
Serhiy Gaidai, governor of Luhansk, an eastern region bordering Russia, wrote earlier on Telegram that a school and a high-rise apartment building had been hit in the city of Sievierodonetsk. “Fortunately, no casualties,” Gaidai said.
