The week began with reports that Russian forces that unsuccessfully tried to take Kyiv were so confident they would win they brought along outfits to hold a parade in the capital, a Ukrainian military official said Thursday. But they wound up dumping their parade attire when they were forced to retreat, according to Oleksandr Gruzevich, deputy chief of staff of Ukraine’s ground forces. At a briefing early Thursday, Gruzevich said Russian troops had left behind formal military attire in the Kyiv region. He went on to warn, however, that the capital city still isn’t in the clear, as “it is likely the enemy has not given up the goal of a second attack on Kyiv—there is such a threat.”
Russian soldiers that ransacked the Chernobyl nuclear site after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine took “souvenirs” with them from laboratories that were highly radioactive and deadly, Ukraine’s state nuclear company said. But if they were hoping to bring these souvenirs back home to impress their friends, they’re in for a surprise, as “carrying such a souvenir with you for two weeks will inevitably lead to radiation burns, radiation sickness and irreversible processes in the body,” according to Energoatom.
Mid-week, the United States and NATO began pointedly dropping the distinctions between "defensive" and "offensive" weaponry that sharply limited what sorts of equipment NATO countries were willing to send to Ukrainian forces. Body armor, ammunition, and anti-armor drones and missiles had been readily handed over; armored vehicles and especially military aircraft were out. The distinction was made in an effort to not be seen as providing anything that could be used to attack Russian territory directly, out of fear that Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin would insist that NATO was now attempting to attack Russia itself. However, it is now Russia's exposed war crimes that have provided the justification for the U.S. now dropping its previous objections to offensive weapons delivery.
Within a week of Putin appointing Aleksandr Dvornikov as the new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, there came reports that chemical weapons were being deployed by Russian soldiers. On April 11, Canadians volunteering in Mariupol reported that Russian troops used used Sarin deployed via a unmanned aerial vehicle. There were no deaths reported, but three were injured.
But easily the most significant development this week was the news that Ukraine sunk the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva— the very ship Ukrainians told to go fuck themselves on the first day of the war. This is likely the largest mass-casualty event for the Russian invaders the entire war, while losing a ship likely costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. (An American guided missile cruiser costs around $1 billion.)
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