Ukraine says its forces pushed back from the centre of key city
The capture of Severodonetsk will open the road for Moscow to another city, Kramatorsk, in their steps towards conquering the whole of Donbas region
KRAMATORSK: Ukraine said on Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky described a fight for “literally every metre”.
The cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which are separated by a river, have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.
Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said on Monday Russian forces were “gathering more and more equipment” to “encircle” Severodonetsk, and that they had “pushed our troops from the centre and continue to destroy our city”.
The local Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of civilians have reportedly taken refuge, was being “heavily shelled”, Gaiday said. In Lysychansk, bombardments killed three civilians, including a six-yearold boy, he said.
Severodonetsk had been “de facto” blocked off after Russian forces blew up the “last” bridge connecting it to Lysychansk on Sunday, Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists, said on Monday.
“The Ukrainian units that are there, they are there forever. They have two options: to surrender or die,” Basurin said.
On Sunday, Zelensky said the latest fighting in Severodonetsk was “very fierce”, adding that Russia was deploying undertrained troops and using its young men as “cannon fodder”.
Russia’s massed artillery in that region gave it a tenfold advantage, the commander-inchief of the Ukrainian military, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said on Sunday. “Every metre of Ukrainian land there is covered in blood but not only ours, but also the occupier’s.”
The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road for Moscow to another major city, Kramatorsk, in their steps towards conquering the whole of Donbas, a mainly Russianspeaking region partly held by proRussian separatists since 2014.
‘War crimes’
On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv - many using banned cluster bombs - had killed hundreds of civilians. “The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report on Ukraine’s second biggest city.
Away from the battlefield, World Trade Organization members gathered in Geneva on Sunday, with the threat posed to global food security by Russia’s war in wheat-producing Ukraine top of the agenda.
Tensions ran high during a closed-door session, where several delegates took the floor to condemn Russia’s war.
Just before Russian Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov spoke, around three dozen delegates “walked out”, the spokesman said.
On a farm near the city of Mykolaiv in the south, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo the damage done by Russian troops that passed through the area in March.
“We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,” including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.
The farm’s warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season’s grain but there are no takers.
The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.
‘Out of it’
Speaking to AFP, Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, said he thought President Vladimir Putin was “out of it”, after seeing the Russian leader summon the country’s top brass for a theatrical meeting three days before the invasion on February 24.
“I knew a different Putin,” said Kasyanov, 64, who served under Putin but has become one of the Kremlin’s most vocal critics.
Kasyanov predicted the war could last for up to two years and said it is imperative that Ukraine win.
“If Ukraine falls, the Baltic states will be next,” he said.