The Ukrainian general staff publishes short situation reports several times a day.

On Wednesday night it said that the Russian armed forces continued to withdraw troops from the areas around Kyiv and Chernihiv;

it was probably a regrouping aimed at concentrating on eastern Ukraine.

The aim of this "retreat", which the Ukrainian military has put in quotation marks, is to mislead the Ukrainian army leadership.

The false impression should be created that the Russian army has given up trying to blockade Kyiv.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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On Wednesday afternoon, the general staff wrote that the enemy may have "temporarily" given up trying to encircle Kyiv.

But it is established that the Russian troops are now concentrated at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant - a good hundred kilometers north of Kyiv.

There are also troop movements in Belarus along the Ukrainian border.

In the Izyum area south of Kharkiv, Russian troops increased their efforts to advance further.

Attacks on Kyiv not stopped

Kharkiv and several other cities in eastern Ukraine came under rocket and artillery fire.

From the point of view of the Ukrainian military, this is what the Russian negotiators presented as a sign of relaxation after the talks in Istanbul on Tuesday: a “cardinal reduction in military activity” around Kyiv and Chernihiv.

For the Ukrainian military, this is just a tactical shift in the behavior of the invaders to respond to.

On the Russian side, too, there is no longer any talk of de-escalation the day after the negotiations.

The Ministry of Defense in Moscow said that after successfully forcing the Ukrainians to concentrate their forces around the big cities, they are now turning to the real goal - the "liberation" of Donbass.

According to Ukrainian information, the Russian side did not even keep their own announcements: Unfortunately, military activity around Kyiv and Chernihiv has not decreased, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister told Ukrainian media on Wednesday morning.

During the night there were attacks on the two cities and towns in the area between them.

"Signals do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells"

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had already warned the Ukrainians in his video speech on Tuesday evening not to attach much importance to the positive signals from the negotiations: "These signals do not drown out the explosions of the Russian missiles." There is no reason to trust the words of "one or other representative of that state who continues to fight to destroy us".

He warned: "You still have enough technology and enough people with absolutely no rights to throw into the cauldron of this war".

In Kyiv, people are preparing for the fact that the Kremlin is now trying to wear Ukraine down.

"The Russians think that despite our resistance and the sanctions against them, they have enough resources to endure a long war," Serhiy Rachmanin, a member of parliament from the Defense Committee, told Ukraine's Novoye Vremya portal.

"Now they're trying to bleed dry what makes our economy and our armed forces thrive."

As evidence of this, Rachmanin cites the air strikes against fuel depots and oil processing plants that have been observed for days.

A rocket attack on Brovary near Kyiv on Tuesday was aimed at a food warehouse.

"Blows to the arteries are expected in the near future - railroads and roads," Rachmanin said.

So the Ukrainians should be cut off from the supply routes.

Act of revenge against regional governor?

Presumably in the expectation of needing them in the event of a rapid advance of their own, the Russian armed forces had so far spared the major transport routes.

This calculation could now change.

The rocket attack on the administration building in Mykolayiv on Tuesday, which, according to the latest information, killed 15 people, is also seen as an expression of a new Russian tactic.

Regional governor Vitaly Kim said in a selfie video on Tuesday that he was trying to see something positive in this attack. The Russians obviously didn't want to take Mykolayiv, on the outskirts of which they were already standing, at the moment.

Because if you want to control a city, don't destroy the administration building from which its entire infrastructure is controlled.

Some observers, however, saw it as a targeted act of revenge on Kim, who played a key role in defending the city and has become a star on social media with his indestructibly upbeat video messages, while as a Russian-speaking half-Korean mocks Russian propaganda about Nazi Ukraine.