Russia launches all-out assault on Ukraine troops
Corpses still being found in Russian-held Mariupol
KYIV/SLOVYANSK, Ukraine (Reuters) – Russian forces were launching an all-out assault to encircle Ukrainian troops in twin cities straddling a river in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, a battle that could determine the success or failure of Moscow’s main campaign in the east.
Exactly three months after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, authorities in Kharkiv, the second-largest city, were expected to open the underground metro, where thousands of civilians had sheltered for months under relentless bombardment.
The reopening is a symbol of Ukraine’s biggest military success over the past few weeks: pushing Russian forces largely out of artillery range of Kharkiv, as they did from Kyiv, the capital, in March.
But the decisive battles of the war’s latest phase are still raging farther south, where Moscow is attempting to seize the Donbas region of two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, and trap Ukrainian forces in a pocket on the main eastern front.
The easternmost parts of the Ukrainian-held Donbas pocket – the city of Sievierodonetsk on the east bank of the Siverskyi Donets River and its twin, Lysychansk, on the west bank – have become the pivotal battlefield there, with Russian forces advancing from three directions to encircle them.
“The enemy has focused its efforts on carrying out an offensive in order to encircle Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk,” said Serhiy Gaidai, governor of Luhansk province, where the two cities are among the last territory still held by Ukraine.
“The intensity of fire on Sievierodonetsk has increased by multiple times, they are simply destroying the city,” he said on TV, adding that there were about 15,000 people in the city, and the Ukrainian military remains in control of it.
Reuters journalists in the Donbas, who reached Bakhmut farther west, heard and saw intense shelling on the highway toward Lysychansk on Monday. Ukrainian armored vehicles, tanks and rocket launchers were
moving toward the front lines, with buses carrying soldiers.
Farther west in Slovyansk, one of the biggest Donbas cities still in Ukrainian hands, air-raid sirens wailed on Tuesday morning. But streets were still busy, with a market full, children and a street musician playing a violin by a supermarket.
Two empty public transportation buses were driving toward the frontline town of Lyman to evacuate civilians from heavy shelling there, escorted by police and a military car.
‘WHO WILL BURY THEM?’
Gaidai said Ukrainian forces had driven the Russians out of the village of Toshkivka just to the south of Sievierodonetsk. That could not be independently confirmed. Four people were killed in the shelling of one home in Sievierodonetsk overnight.
The battle there follows the surrender last week of Ukraine’s garrison in the port of Mariupol after nearly three months of siege in which Kyiv believes tens of thousands of civilians died.
The dead were still being found in the rubble there, Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s Ukrainian mayor, now operating outside the Russian-held city, said.
Some 200 decomposing bodies were found buried in rubble in a basement of one high-rise building, he said. Locals had refused to collect them, and Russian authorities had abandoned the site, leaving a stench across the district.
Russia is now in control of an unbroken swathe of eastern and southern Ukraine, but it has yet to achieve its objective of seizing all of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that the “ruthless” offensive in Donbas showed Ukraine still needed more Western arms, especially multiple rocket-launcher systems, long-range artillery and armored vehicles.
Russia’s three-month-long invasion, the biggest attack on a European state since 1945, has seen more than 6.5 million people flee abroad, turned entire cities into rubble and brought down severe economic sanctions on Moscow.