Ukrainian forces have regained control of the area around the capital city of Kyiv, according to an official in the nation’s government.
In a Saturday Facebook post, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said that “Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel and the whole Kyiv region were liberated from the invader!” NBC News added that the announcement followed the British defense ministry revealing that Russian forces “are reported to have withdrawn from Hostomel airport to the city’s northwest, which has been subject to fighting since the first day of the conflict.”
The development comes one day after Russian forces left the Chernobyl nuclear plant and turned the site back over to Ukraine after stirring up radioactive dust in the plant’s exclusion zone. The Ukrainian defense ministry also attributed the Russian exit to battlefield defeats.
“A big convoy of military vehicles drove along a road right behind our facility and this road goes past the Red Forest,” one Chernobyl employee told Reuters, referencing a forest area near the plant named because of the red color its trees assumed due to radiation exposure after the 1986 meltdown. “The convoy kicked up a big column of dust. Many radiation safety sensors showed exceeded levels.”
As the conflict created a humanitarian crisis in eastern Europe, independent reporter Kassy Dillon traveled to Ukraine with a camera crew on behalf of The Daily Wire.
The team moved from Warsaw, Poland, to a refugee facility on the Polish border of Ukraine before catching a bus used to ferry supplies into the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Dillon witnessed the wartime effort on behalf of Ukrainian citizens firsthand — from a man leaving his family to fight the invaders to a pursemaker who is using his skills to construct vests for body armor.
One man leaving to join the Ukrainian resistance told Dillon that Ukrainians would never accept Russian occupation — no matter the result of the war.
“No. Definitely no,” he said when asked if Ukrainians would ever submit to Russian rule. “We are too different between each other. There is a huge difference between our peoples. They behave as slaves. We don’t.”
Dillon also encountered Lilith Huseimaliieva — an English teacher from Bila Tserkva, a city roughly 50 miles from Kyiv. Now, she and her daughter are in a place they don’t recognize, her husband is back in Ukraine, and she doesn’t know where she will end up next.
“In my hometown, I was a respected person. Now I’m just dust,” Huseimaliieva told The Daily Wire during an in-person interview on a bus filled with refugees traveling to the Polish border from Lviv. “This is how war changes your life.”
“You know, they were saying Russia’s going to attack, Russia’s going to attack,” she said. “We didn’t believe it because we are connected. We are interlaced with Russians and Belarusians many, many generations.”