Eastern assault continues after island withdrawal brings relief
Russia’s withdrawal from a strategic Black Sea island potentially eases the threat to the vital Ukrainian port city of Odesa, but the Kremlin has kept up its push to encircle the last stronghold of resistance in the eastern province of Luhansk.
The Kremlin portrayed the pullout from Snake Island as a ‘‘goodwill gesture’’, but Ukraine’s military claimed it forced the Russians to flee in two small speedboats following a barrage of Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes.
A Russian Defence Ministry spokesman said the withdrawal was intended to demonstrate that Moscow was not hampering United Nations efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor for exporting agricultural products from Ukraine.
Snake Island sits along a busy shipping lane. Russia took control of it in the opening days of the war, in the apparent hope of using it as a staging ground for an assault on Odesa. It took on legendary significance as part of Ukraine’s resistance to the
Russian invasion, when the Ukrainian troops there reportedly received a demand from a Russian warship to surrender or be bombed. The answer supposedly came back, ‘‘Go f... yourself.’’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that although the pullout did not guarantee the Black Sea region’s safety, it would ‘‘significantly limit’’ Russian activities there.
Meanwhile, Moscow yesterday kept up its push to take control of the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. It is focused on the city of Lysychansk, the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in Luhansk province.
Russian troops and their separatist allies control 95% of Luhansk and about half of Donetsk, the two provinces that make up the mostly Russianspeaking Donbas.
Ukraine said the Russians were shelling Lysychansk and clashing with Ukrainian defenders around an oil refinery on its edges. It made no reference to claims that attacking forces had been able to cross the strategic Siverskiy Donets river and enter the city from the north.
Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said the Russians were trying to block a highway used to deliver supplies to Lysychansk, and fully encircle the city.
■ A group of wives of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine have issued a video appeal demanding that their husbands be sent home from the ‘‘unjust’’ war.
More than a dozen women and a child from Buryatia, an impoverished district in eastern
Siberia, said their husbands had left in January for ‘‘training in Belarus’’ and had not returned, according to the Centre for Defence Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank.
One of the women called the war ‘‘unjust’’ in comments on social media, and said local authorities should take the blame for any more men killed.
The Kremlin has been accused by campaigners of using Buryatia’s
population as ‘‘cannon fodder’’ for its war in Ukraine. The region has suffered some of the highest casualty rates in the war. Many young men there join the military as contract soldiers because of a lack of alternative jobs.
The women are the wives of troops in Russia’s 5th Tank Brigade of Tatsin, military unit 46108, which is understood to have suffered at least 30 casualties since the invasion began.
Their appeal highlights the increasing frustration among families in Russia who believed that their husbands and sons had been sent away for training, only to find them engaged in a war.
In a statement read by one of the women, they called on the local governor to investigate and bring the men home. They said their husbands were ‘‘exhausted’’, and many of them were suffering from ill health.
On social media, Vera Partilkhaeva, believed to be one of the women in the video, wrote: ‘‘Everyone is afraid. The command has been given to be silent! Let the death of every military man in this unjust war be on your conscience! We demand the return of our sons and husbands to their homeland.’’
■ The European Court of Human Rights has ordered Russia not to execute two British soldiers captured in Mariupol while fighting in the Ukrainian army.
Earlier this month, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner were sentenced to death by a court in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. They were falsely accused of being mercenaries when they were both fully enlisted in the Ukrainian military.
Russia ‘‘should ensure that the death penalty imposed on the applicants was not carried out’’, the ECHR said yesterday. It added that Russia must ‘‘ensure appropriate conditions of their detention, and provide them with any necessary medical assistance and medication’’.
The Russian parliament passed a law earlier this month that removed the country from the court’s jurisdiction.
‘‘Russia no longer complies with the prescriptions of the ECHR – that’s all there is to say,’’ said Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman.