What 11 April 2022 showed about the war's shift

What did the war look like on 11 April 2022, as it moved away from the Kyiv region and towards the east and south? The reports from that day and the one before it show a conflict in transition, with new fighting in the Donbas, a besieged port city and growing evidence of the toll in areas Russian forces had left.

Mariupol under siege

The defence of besieged Mariupol continued on 11 April with intense fighting and bombardment throughout the day, according to General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address that the siege could be lifted if Ukraine had the proper military weapons. He also said the city had been completely destroyed and put the death toll at tens of thousands.

Fighting turns east

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies, released on 10 April, showed a 13-kilometre column of military vehicles heading south through Ukraine towards the Donbas. On 11 April, Pavlo Kyrylenko, Governor of Donetsk Oblast, said rocket attacks in the region had killed three people and injured eight more. A day earlier, Russian shelling in the town of Derhachi in Kharkiv Oblast had killed two people and injured several others.

On 10 April, the Russian Ministry of Defence spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, claimed that air-launched Russian missiles had hit Ukrainian S-300 air-defence systems in the south of Mykolaiv Oblast and at an airbase in Chuhuiv. That was a Russian claim, not a confirmed outcome.

The toll in the north

The areas around Kyiv were still yielding evidence of what had happened there. On 10 April, a mass grave of Ukrainian civilians was discovered near the village of Buzova in Kyiv Oblast. Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said 1,222 bodies had been found so far in the oblast.

In his address on 11 April, Zelenskyy said retreating Russian forces had deliberately left tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of unexploded mines in northern Ukraine. He described this as a war crime. The UN refugee agency reported on 10 April that 4.5 million Ukrainians had left the country since the war began.

Money and diplomacy

The war's financial effects were also visible on 11 April. After S&P lowered Russia's foreign debt rating to "SD", meaning selective default, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia that the government was preparing to sue to force investors to accept its payments.

Diplomacy continued as well. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Biden held a virtual meeting to discuss their countries' differing positions on Ukraine. India remained non-aligned and, despite growing US pressure, held to its stance of supporting an end to the war without criticising Russia.

What the day shows

Taken together, the reports describe three overlapping pressures: a renewed military focus on the Donbas and the south, the continuing documentation of civilian deaths and hazards in areas Russian troops had left, and economic and diplomatic consequences beyond the front. Zelenskyy's remark on Mariupol tied the city's fate directly to the question of weapons, a point he made on the same day the fighting there was described as intense and continuous.