April 29, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Authorities in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, have urged people not to use their cars to save fuel for the military.

"Kyivites, if you have returned to the capital, please use public transport if possible. Those in safe places [outside Kyiv], please wait before coming back," said Mykola Povoroznyk, deputy head of Kyiv City State Administration, adding that authorities are keeping the needs of the Ukrainian military and defenders in mind.

Povoroznyk said there are no problems with public transport network in the city, which was constantly expanding to provide transportation for residents returning to the capital.

The authorities in the capital have urged citizens not to return yet because of the continuing danger of missile attacks. At one point about one-third of Kyiv's population was thought to have left.

The US believes Russia is attempting to disrupt the Ukrainian military’s ability to “replenish their own stores and to reinforce themselves,” according to a senior US defense official.

The official gave the example of attempted Russian attacks on electrical power facilities, which could hinder Ukrainian trains.

The US also believes that while recent strikes reportedly hit residential areas, they were intended for military production facilities, the official added.

Russian strikes in Odesa are possibly meant to pin down Ukrainian forces there and prevent them from reinforcing defenders in the Donbas region, according to the official.

The official also said that now 1,950 missiles have been launched by Russia against Ukraine since the invasion began in February, and that most of the ordnance being dropped against Mariupol is “dumb” ordnance that is not precision-guided, which suggests Russian forces are still having difficulty replenishing their precision-guided munitions.

Meanwhile, the US has also trained two groups of Ukrainian trainers so far on US artillery outside of Ukraine, according to the official, with the first group being “a little it more than 50” and the second group being “around 50.”

The US has also trained a group of about 15 Ukrainians on the US radar systems that are being provided to Ukraine, with more groups of a yet to be determined number to be trained in the future, the official said.

US training for Ukrainians will “go on for as long as it needs to go on,” the official added.

The US is helping transport some Ukrainians already outside of Ukraine for training and returning them to locations outside of Ukraine so they can reenter Ukraine, according to the official, who stressed that all US transportation of Ukrainian trainers “starts and ends outside of Ukraine.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a tweet Friday that the UN will not give up and would redouble its efforts to save lives and reduce human suffering in Ukraine.

His tweet came after his visit to Ukraine and meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday. He also visited to Moscow on Tuesday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

During a news conference in Kyiv with Zelensky, Guterres urged for evacuation corridors to be open in Mariupol, saying, “Today the people of Mariupol are in desperate need of such an approach. Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis,” and added “Thousands of civilians need life-saving assistance. Many are elderly need medical care or have limited mobility, they need an escape route out of the apocalypse.”

US intelligence has assessed that Russian intelligence was behind a recent attack in Moscow on a Nobel Prize winner and independent Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov who has spoken publicly in opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The editor of the independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was attacked while traveling on a train from Moscow to Samara on April 7 by an unknown assailant who doused the train compartment with red oil paint mixed with acetone.

“Eyes burn terribly,” Muratov said in a statement posted to the paper’s website. The assailant shouted, “Muratov, here’s to you for our boys,” in an apparent reference to Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, he wrote. 

“The United States can confirm that Russian intelligence orchestrated the 7 April attack on Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief Dmitriy Muratov, in which he was splashed with red paint containing acetone,” a US official said in a statement. 

The US official did not provide details on how the US reached its assessment, nor did this person provide details on which arm of Russian intelligence had arranged the attack. 

A spokesperson for Novaya Gazeta appeared to cast doubt on the US assessment in a statement to CNN.  

“We have established the attackers, so it is now [sic] clear what prevents the Ministry of Internal Affairs from opening it,” said the paper's spokesperson Nadezhda Prusenkova. “We don't know if there is a ‘stinking unit’ in intelligence that is involved in such attacks. But we have experience of such attacks on the editorial office, and it was still not intelligence back then.”

Prusenkova noted that “the attack has yet to be prosecuted” and called for a criminal case to be opened. 

Days prior to the attack, Novaya Gazeta had suspended its operations until the end of the war in Ukraine, amid mounting pressure from Russian authorities and a wartime censorship law that threatened up to 15 years in prison for publishing what Russia terms “fake” news about the conflict. 

CNN has reached out to the Russian embassy for comment.

The Washington Post first reported the US assessment. 

US President Joe Biden and his advisers are still in conversations about how to approach November’s G20 summit, whose hosts received confirmation Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to attend.

Biden has said Russia should be ejected from the G20. Senior members of his administration have walked out of G20 events where Russian delegates are present. And there were discussions with Indonesia, who is hosting the summit, about stepping up its condemnation of Russia and how to approach the sticky situation.

But no decision on boycotting the leaders’ summit, still six months away, has been made. And officials are weighing the downsides of skipping the event and ceding the table to Russia and China.

White House aides are realistic the G20 will not collectively remove Russia from its ranks, since the decision requires consensus and China has been clear they don’t support such a move. That makes this a different scenario than when Russia was expelled from the G8 after its annexation of Crimea.

That sets up a potentially complicated summit on the Indonesian island Bali, which is scheduled to begin in the beginning of November. White House officials have mulled a number of different scenarios, including potentially sending a lower-level delegation or participating remotely. But Biden attending in person is still considered the likeliest outcome, even if Putin is also there.

NATO fighter jets stationed in both the Baltic and Black Sea regions scrambled “multiple times over the past four days” to track and intercept Russian aircraft near alliance airspace, according to a statement posted by NATO’s Allied Air Command.

NATO radars tracked a number of unidentified aircraft over the Baltic and Black Sea since Tuesday. NATO noted that Russian aircraft often “do not transmit a transponder code indicating their position and altitude, do not file a flight plan, or do not communicate.”

In the Baltic region, fighter jets from Poland, Denmark, France and Spain were used at various times to intercept and identify approaching aircraft. In the Black Sea region, aircraft from Romania and the UK were used to investigate tracks of unknown aircraft approaching allied airspace, the statement said. There is no indication that US aircraft participated in the interceptions.

NATO said that the Russian aircraft never entered the alliance's airspace, and the “interceptions were conducted in a safe and routine manner.”

Norway has said it is following the European Union's fifth sanctions package on Russia and will introduce a ban on Russian road transport and Russian vessels being allowed to dock.

In a statement Friday, Anniken Huitfeldt, the Norwegian minister of foreign affairs, said, “We know that sanctions work best when several countries agree on them,” and “with this, we are implementing the EU's fifth and final sanctions package.”

A news release from the Norwegian government announced that starting on May 7, “there will be a ban on port calls for Russian-flagged vessels,” including commercial ships, yachts, some pleasure craft and recreational vessels.

Due to the special agreement between Norway and Russia on the management and conservation of fish stocks in the Barents Sea, the ban will not include fishing vessels, search and rescue vessels or research vessels, according to the news release. 

“The ban on freight transport by road will apply to transport companies established in Russia and apply immediately,” the news release added. 

The European Union adopted a fifth round of sanctions against Russia on April 8. 

Norway is part of the European Economic Area which gives the country access to the European Union’s internal market, but the country does not have to adopt EU foreign policy or rules on justice and home affairs.

Two regions of Russia that border Ukraine — Kursk and Bryansk — said that their territory has been shelled.

According to Starovoit, “the firing points were suppressed by the return fire of [Russian] border guards and the military.” There were no casualties or destruction, he added.

The head of the Bryansk region, Alexander Bogomaz, said the border department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) had reported shelling in the village of Belaya Berezka, allegedly carried out from Ukrainian territory.

“On April 29, a branch of the border department of the FSB of Russia in the Bryansk region in the village of Belaya Berezka, Trubchevsky district, was subjected to mortar fire from the territory of Ukraine,” Bogomaz said in a Telegram post on his official channel Friday. He said there were no casualties.

Water and electricity networks were damaged as a result of the shelling in the Bryansk region, Bogomaz added.

The mayor of Mariupol said that more than 600 people were injured in Russian bombing that struck the makeshift hospital facility within the besieged Azovstal steel complex.

"You already know that they dropped bombs on the hospital, aerial bombs destroyed the hospital, and that is a sign of a war crime, because the number of wounded before that was 170, and now it is over 600," the mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said on Ukrainian television.

The Azovstal plant was heavily bombed on Wednesday night, according to multiple accounts.

Boichenko also claimed that the Russians had set up four "filtration" centers in the city where those who want to be evacuated are screened.

"If someone leaves the city and he is, in one way or another, connected with the civil service, with the municipal service, they get the sad news that they go to prison. Such people are being held and tortured there," he claimed.

CNN cannot verify the mayor's allegations.

He said some families who wanted to leave for Ukrainian territory were being forced to go to Russian-controlled areas.