Soldiers vow to fight ‘until the end’ for key Donbas city

A UKRAINIAN soldier has been filmed calmly applying a tourniquet and fighting on after he was shot in the arm during fierce street-to-street fighting in the city of Severodonetsk.

Ukrainian officials said troops would fight “until the end” as Russia was yesterday on the brink of capturing the key city in the Donbas region.

The Governor of Luhansk has said that soldiers are preparing to retreat across the Siverskyi Donets river into the neighbouring town of Lysychansk.

Serhiy Gaiday yesterday said that there was “fierce street-to-street fighting” and acknowledged that Russia had seized “most of the city”.

“The Russians have not lost steam. There are lots of them, and they keep on destroying our region,” he said.

In the footage released by Ukrainian authorities, a soldier is seen mid-battle with his back to the corner of a building. He turns the corner to fire off rounds at the Russian positions. Bullets crack past his shoulder and then he shouts “300”, code for wounded-in-action.

“Calm down. It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” the soldier says as he applies a tourniquet to his injured left arm.

At least 12,000 people are believed to have stayed behind in the city despite attempts to evacuate the whole population.

Once in control of Severodonetsk, Russian forces will likely try to cross the Siverskyi Donets river which flows through the city to enter Ukrainian government-controlled parts of the Donetsk region, Britain’s defence ministry said yesterday. Ukrainian troops have blown up bridges across the river to foil the Russian offensive.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said at the start of the war the goal of the invasion was to “liberate” the predominantly Russian-speaking Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The capture of the region would allow him to declare at least a partial victory in the war.

While Russia keeps pounding eastern Ukraine, local authorities are warning about an impending humanitarian catastrophe. Ukraine’s Emergency Situations service said yesterday residents of the Luhansk regions would soon run out of safe drinking water as water mains have been destroyed by shelling throughout the area.