Russian forces enter town near Chornobyl as Zelensky compares war to Syrian conflict

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Russian forces have entered Slavutych, a Ukrainian town near the border with Belarus and home to workers at the Chornobyl nuclear plant, the governor of the Kyiv region said Saturday. Residents responded with a protest against Russia's month-long invasion of Ukraine.

Gov. Oleksandr Pavlyuk said Russians seized a hospital and kidnapped the city's mayor, but some media reported later in the day that the mayor was released swiftly. Neither claim could be verified independently.

Slavutych is north of Kyiv and west of Chernihiv, outside the so-called exclusion zone that was established around the power plant after the 1986 disaster. Ukrainian staff have continued to work at the plant itself after it was seized by Russian forces soon after the start of the invasion last month.

Pavlyuk said residents of Slavutych took to the main square, carrying Ukrainian flags.

"The Russians opened fire into the air. They threw flash-bang [stun] grenades into the crowd. But the residents did not disperse," Pavlyuk said. "On the contrary, more of them showed up."

Close to Ukraine's border with Poland, two rockets hit the outskirts of the western city of Lviv on Saturday, wounding five people, regional Gov. Maksym Kozytsky said. Residents were told to seek shelter from what appeared to be the first attack within the city's limits.

"There have been three powerful explosions near Lviv … Everyone should keep calm and stay indoors," city council official Igor Zinkevych said in a Facebook post.

Witnesses saw heavy black smoke rising from the northeast side of the city, which has been a refuge for thousands of displaced people.

Lviv Mayor Andriy Ivanovych Sadovyi said the strikes set fire to an industrial facility storing fuel and no residential buildings were hit.

With Russia continuing to strike and encircle urban populations, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol in the south, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday that they cannot trust statements from the Russian military Friday suggesting that the Kremlin planned to concentrate its remaining strength on wresting the entirety of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region from Ukrainian control.

"We cannot believe the statements from Moscow because there's still a lot of untruth and lies from that side," Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian defence minister, told the BBC. "That's why we understand the goal of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin still is the whole of Ukraine."

To the south in Mariupol, Mayor Vadym Boichenko said the situation remained critical, with street fighting taking place in the centre of the port city. Mariupol has been under siege from Russian forces for more than three weeks, suffering from multiple waves of bombings that have cut the city's electricity and communication lines as well as food and water supplies. From a pre-invasion population of 430,000, between 100,000 and 150,000 people remain.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Saturday said civilians trying to leave Mariupol would have to leave in private cars as Russian forces were not letting buses through their checkpoints around the city.