Chernihiv governor: No let-up in Russian attacks despite claims

The governor of Chernihiv announced on Wednesday that Russia had not slowed its attacks on the Ukrainian city despite vowing to reduce military activity in the area, according to multiple reports. 

“Yesterday, the Russians publicly stated that they were reducing their offensive actions and activity in the Chernihiv and Kyiv areas,” Viacheslav Chaus said in a message on Telegram, according to The New York Times. “Do we believe in it? Of course not.” 

“Civil infrastructure has been destroyed again. Libraries, shopping malls and other facilities have been destroyed, and many houses have been destroyed,” the governor added. “Because, in fact, the enemy roamed Chernihiv all night.”

In an interview with the BBC, Chaus said that “there wasn’t even a single time when [Russian] military forces kept their word.” 

“Chernihiv still has no electricity, water supply and heat. It won’t be easy to restore this infrastructure,” he said. “None of the military buildings were targeted last night. They kept attacking only civilian infrastructure.”

The Times noted that attacks on the area, northeast of Kyiv and near the Belarus border, left at least 10 people who were waiting in a bread line dead, while thousands of civilians have evacuated the city.

Russia’s promise to reduce some combat operations in Kyiv and Chernihiv came after hours of peace talks on Tuesday with Ukrainian representatives in Istanbul.

Those peace talks, however, did not see any breakthroughs. 

“What is positive is that the Ukrainian side has at least started to specifically formulating and putting on paper what it is proposing. Until now we had not managed to achieve that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the BBC.

“As regards the rest, we cannot, put it this way, at present state there have been any breakthroughs, anything very promising,” he added.

Meanwhile, President Biden voiced skepticism on Tuesday about Moscow’s pledge to dial back some of its operations.

“We’ll see,” Biden said at the time. “I don’t read anything into it until I see what their actions are.”   

“We’ll see if they follow through on what they are suggesting,” the president added.