Expert fears a major attack in the east: "A dimension that exceeds everything I've seen"

Created: 04/16/2022, 11:09 am

By: Kathrin Reikowski

Attacks on Kharkiv, warning of nuclear weapons - acts of revenge by Russia give an idea of ​​​​what Ukraine could face by May 9th.

The news ticker.

• Escalated Ukraine conflict: After the attack by the Russian warship Moskva, Russia has apparently stepped up attacks on Ukraine.

• Ukraine war/further developments: Selenskyj and the USA fear the use of nuclear weapons

• War in eastern Ukraine: German military expert speaks of "unprecedented dimensions".

• This

  news ticker

  on military developments in the Ukraine war is updated regularly.

Update from April 16, 10:57 a.m

.: According to Ukrainian information, nine escape corridors for the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have been set up for Saturday.

There is an opportunity for private vehicles to escape from the particularly affected port city of Mariupol in the Donetsk region in the direction of the city of Zaporizhia, said Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Wereshchuk in Kyiv on Saturday.

Further escape corridors from the east were set up with a provisional destination of Bachmut.

People should also be brought to safety from the destroyed city of Sievjerodonetsk.

About 20,000 of the once around 130,000 inhabitants are said to still live there.

Whether the humanitarian corridors will work or will come under fire again remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Kiev's Mayor Vitali Klitschko is reporting several explosions in the Darnyrskyj district of Kiev.

There is currently no information about possible victims, he said in online networks.

Ukraine War: Russia escalates attacks after warship Moskva sinks

First report from April 16, 10:53 a.m

.: Kiev/Moscow/Berlin – On Friday and on the night of Saturday, Russia expanded the attacks in the Ukraine war*.

The Russian Defense Ministry had announced that "the number and scale of rocket attacks on targets in Kyiv" would increase in response to "terrorist attacks or acts of sabotage by the nationalist Kiev regime on Russian territory".

The current expansion of the attacks is a reaction to the sunken warship Moskva*.

As reported by

, air alarms could be heard in large parts of the country on Saturday morning, and explosions were reported from Kiev* and Lviv in western Ukraine.

According to an AFP reporter, a workshop and an administration building where "Neptune" rockets were produced were destroyed in a rocket attack on an armaments complex near Kyiv. According to US information, these were also fired at the sunken Moskva.

Nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war?

What further developments are to be feared?

There were also heavy bombing raids on the east of the country.

At least seven civilians were killed and 27 others injured in an attack on buses that were supposed to take people from eastern Ukraine to safety in the Kharkov region on Friday.

Seventy percent of the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievjerodonetsk is said to have been destroyed.

This Ukrainian information could not be independently verified.

A man examines his burned car after a Russian attack in Kharkiv.

© Felipe Dana/AP/dpa

"Russia is worth nothing for a human life," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a CNN interview.

He therefore assumes that Russia will no longer shy away from using tactical nuclear and chemical weapons.

The whole world should be prepared for it.

The CIA had also spoken of findings on the planned use of nuclear weapons.

You can read this and other previous developments in our Ukraine war ticker from Friday.

Ukraine war: German military expert finds no words for suffering in eastern Ukraine

"The whole thing is a dimension that exceeds everything I've seen, from personal experience," says Hans-Lothar Domröse, a former NATO general, with a view to eastern Ukraine.

In a

interview he said: "Unfortunately, I have seen dead people and fallen, but to this extent, this destruction, it surpasses everything.

Some of the people in eastern Ukraine have been at war for eight years, everyone is tired, everyone is looking straight ahead, as if hollow, looking right through you.

Millions of people are traumatized!”

Like other international military experts, he assumes that Russia* wants to have completed the so-called "liberation" of eastern Ukraine by May 9th.

A triangle between Crimea, Kharkiv and Mariupol of 400 by 250 kilometers should be separated from Ukraine.

“The Ukrainian military, as well as the civilian population, must fear a tremendous blow.

We see Grozny, Aleppo, Chechnya to a certain extent, and they just roll through and say: It doesn't matter what.

I assume that's the order," said Domröse.

For Ukraine*, that could only mean evacuating more people and standing still at the same time.

(kat) *

.