San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
RUSSIAN FORCES PRESS ASSAULT ON EASTERN UKRAINIAN CITY
Official says fate of Luhansk province to be decided in days
Russian forces pounded the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an allout attempt to seize the last stronghold of resistance in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, the governor said Saturday.
A presidential adviser said its fate would be decided within the next two days.
Ukrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to defend the city and to keep it from falling to Russia, as neighboring Sievierodonetsk did a week ago.
“Over the last day, the occupiers opened fire from all available kinds of weapons,” Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said Saturday on the Telegram messaging app.
A river separates Lysychansk from Sievierodonetsk, and Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said during an online interview late Saturday that Russian forces had managed for the first time to cross the river from the north, creating a “threatening” situation.
He said they had not reached the center of the city, but control over Lysychansk would be decided by Monday.
Volodymyr Nazarenko, the second in command of the Svoboda battalion who was part of the June 24 retreat from Sievierodonetsk, said the Russians had “methodically leveled” the city.
He described how Russian tanks targeted one building after another, moving on after each one was destroyed.
“So they use these tactics where barrages of ammunition are used to destroy the city and turn it into a burnt-down desert,” Nazarenko said from the relative safety of Bakhmut, a city to the southwest.
He also said Russian troops “obliterated any potential defensive positions with constant artillery and burned down forests to prevent trench warfare.”
Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk are the two provinces that make up the Donbas, where Russia has focused its offensive since pulling back from northern Ukraine and the capital, Kyiv, in the spring.
Pro-russia separatists have held portions of both eastern provinces since 2014, and Moscow recognizes all of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign republics.
Syria’s government said Wednesday that it would also recognize the “independence and sovereignty” of the two areas and work to establish diplomatic relations with the separatists.
The leader of neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally, claimed Saturday that Ukraine fired missiles at military targets on Belarusian territory several days ago but all were intercepted by the air defense system.
President Alexander Lukashenko described it as a provocation and noted that no Belarusian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. There was no immediate response from the Ukrainian military.
Belarus hosts Russian military units and was used as a staging ground for Russia’s invasion.
Last week, just hours before Lukashenko was to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian long-range bombers fired missiles on Ukraine from Belarusian airspace for the first time.
Lukashenko has so far resisted efforts to draw his army into the war.
But during their meeting, Putin announced that Russia planned to supply Belarus with the Iskander-m missile system and reminded Lukashenko of how dependent his government is on economic support from Russia.