A key city east of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, has been recaptured from Russian forces, Ukrainian officials have said, but retreating troops were said to be heavily mining the lost territory in their wake.
The city of Brovary was said by its mayor to have been liberated with Ukrainian forces working to drive out the last Russian troops and clear the area of “military hardware”.
The latest success, 12 miles east of Kyiv, came as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, warned that Russian forces were creating “a complete disaster” by leaving mines on homes and corpses as they retreated.
Russia has continued withdrawing some of its ground forces from areas around the capital after saying earlier this week it would reduce military activity near the Ukrainian capital and the northern city of Chernihiv.
But in his regular address in the early hours of Saturday, Zelenskiy said the satellite towns around the city were being indiscriminately booby-trapped.
He said: “They are mining the whole territory. They are mining homes, mining equipment, even the bodies of people who were killed. There are a lot of trip wires, a lot of other dangers.”
Amid reports of missile attacks on the central Ukraine cities of Poltava and Kremenchuk on Saturday morning, Zelenskiy said the Russians were withdrawing “slowly but noticeably”.
He pleaded with Russian families not to let their young men sign up for the army as the Kremlin’s annual military conscription drive began.
“We don’t need more dead people here. Save your children so they do not become villains. Don’t send them to the army. Do whatever you can to keep them alive. Keep them at home,” he said, adding that he believed Russia was trying to recruit conscripts from Crimea.
Ukraine’s military said on Friday it had retaken 29 settlements in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions.
But Ukraine and its allies warned that the Kremlin was not de-escalating to promote trust at the bargaining table, as it claimed, but instead resupplying and shifting its troops to the country’s east.
Those movements appear to be preparation for an intensified assault on the self-proclaimed republics of the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas in Ukraine’s east, which includes Mariupol.
Zelenskiy did not say anything about the latest round of talks, which took place on Friday by video. At a round of talks earlier in the week, Ukraine said it would be willing to abandon an attempt to join Nato and declare itself neutral – Moscow’s chief demand – in return for security guarantees from several other countries.
The invasion has left thousands dead and driven more than 4 million refugees from Ukraine.
Mariupol, the shattered and besieged southern port city, has seen some of the worst suffering of the war. Its capture would be a major prize for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, giving his country an unbroken land bridge to Crimea, seized from Ukraine in 2014.
On Friday, the International Committee for the Red Cross said it was unable to carry out an operation to bring civilians out of Mariupol by bus. City authorities said the Russians were blocking access to the city.
“We do not see a real desire on the part of the Russians and their satellites to provide an opportunity for Mariupol residents to evacuate to territory controlled by Ukraine,” Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
He said Russian forces were “categorically not allowing any humanitarian cargo, even in small amounts, into the city.”
About 100,000 people are believed to remain in the city, down from a prewar 430,000. Weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting have caused severe shortages of water, food, fuel and medicine.
“We are running out of adjectives to describe the horrors that residents in Mariupol have suffered,” said Ewan Watson, a Red Cross spokesperson.
On Thursday, Russian forces blocked a 45-bus convoy attempting to evacuate people from Mariupol and seized 14 tonnes of food and medical supplies bound for the city, Ukrainian authorities said.
Zelenskiy said more than 3,000 people were able to leave Mariupol on Friday. He said he discussed the humanitarian disaster with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, by telephone and with the president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, during her visit to Kyiv.
“Europe doesn’t have the right to be silent about what is happening in our Mariupol,” Zelenskiy said. “The whole world should respond to this humanitarian catastrophe.”