Concerns growing in Donbas region
Russian siege tactics stoke fears of repeat of Mariupol horrors
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Moscow-backed separatists pounded eastern Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region Friday, claiming the capture of a railway hub as concerns grew that besieged cities in the region would undergo the same horrors experienced by the people of Mariupol in the weeks leading up to the port’s capture.
Authorities say 1,500 people have died in Donbas since the war began just over three months ago. Characterizing the battle as grave, Ukrainian officials renewed their appeals for more sophisticated Western-supplied weaponry.
The fighting Friday focused on two key cities: Sievierodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk. They are the last areas under Ukrainian control in Luhansk, one of two provinces that make up the Donbas and where Russia-backed separatists have already controlled some territory for eight years.
“Massive artillery shelling does not stop, day and night,” said Sievierodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Striuk. “The city is being systematically destroyed — 90% of the buildings in the city are damaged.”
Striuk described conditions in his city as reminiscent of the battle for Mariupol, located in the Donbas’ other province, Donetsk. Now in ruins, the port was constantly barraged by Russian forces in a nearly three-month siege that ended last week when Russia claimed its capture. More than 20,000
of its civilians are feared dead.
Before the war, Sievierodonetsk was home to around 100,000 people. About 12,000 to 13,000 remain in the city, Striuk said, huddled in shelters and largely cut off from the rest of Ukraine. At least 1,500 people there have died because of the war. The figure includes people killed by shelling or in fires caused by Russian missile strikes, as well as those who died from wounds, diseases, a lack of medicine or while trapped under rubble, the mayor said.
An assault was underway Friday in the city’s northeastern quarter, where Russian reconnaissance and sabotage groups tried to capture a hotel and the area around it, Striuk said.
Hints of Russia’s strategy for the Donbas can be found in Mariupol, where Moscow is consolidating control through measures including state-controlled broadcast programming and overhauled school curricula, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
“It appears that Russia has once again adjusted its objectives, and fearfully now it seems that they are trying to consolidate and enforce the land that they have rather than focus on expanding it,” Gen. Phillip Breedlove, former head of U.S. European Command for NATO said Friday during a panel put on by the Washington-based Middle East Institute.
But the relentless assaults in the Donbas also indicated Russia’s desire to expand its dominion there. Ukrainian analysts said Russian forces have taken advantage of delays in Western arms shipments to step up their offensive there.
That aggressive push could backfire, however, by seriously depleting Russia’s arsenal. Echoing an assessment from the British Defense Ministry, military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said Russia was deploying 50-year-old tanks, “which means that the second army of the world has run out of modernized equipment.”
Russia-backed rebels said Friday that they had taken over Lyman, Donetsk’s large railway hub north of two more key cities still under Ukrainian control. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich acknowledged the loss Thursday night, while a Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesperson reported Friday that its soldiers countered Russian attempts to completely push them out.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pleaded with Western nations for artillery and rocket-launching systems: “Without artillery, without multiple launch rocket systems we won’t be able to push them back,” he said.
South of Sievierodonetsk, volunteers hoped to evacuate 100 people from a smaller town. It was a painstaking process: Many of the evacuees from Bakhmut were elderly or infirm and needed to be carried out of apartment buildings in soft stretchers and wheelchairs.
“Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” said Mark Poppert, an American volunteer working with British charity RefugEase. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can.”
In his nightly address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had harsh words for the European Union, which has not agreed on a sixth round of sanctions that includes an embargo on Russian oil. Hungary, one of Moscow’s closest EU allies, is obstructing the deal.
Zelenskyy said Russia’s offensive in the Donbas could leave its communities in ashes, and he accused Moscow of pursuing “an obvious policy of genocide.”