IN THE WORLD TODAY

Moscow rains fire on Ukraine

RUSSIAN attacks have laid down a curtain of fire across areas of eastern Ukraine where pockets of resistance are denying Moscow full military control of the region, almost four months after the Kremlin unleashed its invasion.

“Today everything that can burn is on fire,” Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, told the Associated Press (AP).

Russia’s war has caused alarm over food supplies from Ukraine to the rest of the world and gas supplies from Russia, as well as raising questions about security in western Europe.

The Russian military currently controls about 95% of the Luhansk region but Moscow has struggled for weeks to overrun it completely, despite deploying additional troops and possessing a massive advantage in military assets.

In the city of Sievierodonetsk, the hotspot of the fighting, Ukrainian defenders held on to the Azot chemical plant in the industrial outskirts.

About 500 civilians are sheltering at the plant, and Haidai said the Russian forces are turning the area “into ruins”.

“It is a sheer catastrophe,” Haidai told the AP in written comments about the plant.

“Our positions are being fired at from howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, large-calibre artillery, missile strikes.”

The defence of the chemical plant recalled the besieged Azovstal steel mill in the brutalised city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian troops were pinned down for weeks.

The neighbouring Lysychansk, the only city in the Luhansk region that is still fully under Ukrainian control, is also the target of multiple air strikes.