Pro-Russian separatists said on Saturday that Lisitchansk, a key city in eastern Ukraine that has seen fierce fighting in recent days, is under siege. In the war of versions that marks this conflict, Kiev admits the occurrence of intense battles, but says that the municipality is not surrounded.
“Today, the Lugansk people’s militia [provÃncia na região do Donbass] and the Russian Armed Forces occupied the last strategic positions [no local]which allows us to say that Lisitchansk is surrounded,” said Andrei Marotchko, a member of the separatist army, quoted by Russian state agency Tass.
The location is the last important one in the area that is still under the control of Kiev’s military. Its twin city, Severodonetsk, separated by the Donets River, fell to Moscow last week after Ukrainian troops, who had fought there for weeks, withdrew from the region.
Taking Lisitchansk would allow the Russians to advance to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two other important cities in the Donbass, eastern Ukraine, whose conquest is the Kremlin’s declared objective.
Despite the Russian offensive, troops in Konstiantinivka, 115 km from Lisitchansk, claim to have managed to keep the supply road to the embattled city open. “We still use the road, but it is within range of Russian artillery,” said one soldier who asked not to be named. “Russian tactic now is to bomb any building we can locate ourselves in. Then they move on to the next one.”
The soldier’s account is borne out by the statement by Serhi Gaidai, governor of Lugansk, who wrote on the messaging app Telegram that houses in attacked villages are being set on fire one by one — and the bombings would prevent residents from being able to put out the fires.
Also on Saturday, explosions rocked Mikolaiv in the south, according to Mayor Oleksandr Senkevtch. The cause was unclear, although Russia later said it had struck Ukrainian army command posts in the area. The claims could not be independently verified. Over the past few days, Moscow has attacked cities far behind the front lines in the east. On Friday, a missile destroyed a residential building near Odessa, in the south, leaving, according to local authorities, at least 21 dead. On Monday, a mall was hit, in Krementchuk, in the central region, killing 19 people.
In a speech to the country’s parliament on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the attacks as “conscious and deliberately targeted Russian terror, not some sort of mistake or a coincidental missile strike”. Moscow denies such accusations and says it does not target civilians.
However, since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, thousands of them have been killed and cities razed to the ground. Despite being attacked in the east, Ukrainian forces made some advances elsewhere, including forcing Russia to withdraw from Cobra Island, an outcrop of the Black Sea about 140 km southeast of Odessa that the Russians had captured earlier. of the conflict.
Moscow used the island to impose a blockade on Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters and a major producer of seeds for vegetable oils. The disruptions spurred a rise in global grain and food prices. Russia, also a major grain producer, denies causing the food crisis, blaming Western sanctions for hurting its exports.
