Brutal battle for every inch of key eastern city rages on
BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Ukrainian and Russian forces battled fiercely for control of a key eastern city Wednesday.
The urban battle for Sievierodonetsk testified to the painstaking, inch-by-inch campaign by Moscow’s troops to seize the eastern industrial heartland known as the Donbas.
Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai acknowledged the difficulties, saying, “Maybe we will have to retreat, but right now battles are ongoing in the city.”
“Everything the Russian army has — artillery, mortars, tanks, aviation — all of that, they’re using in Sievierodonetsk in order to wipe the city off the face of the Earth and capture it completely,” he said.
Sievierodonetsk, which had a prewar population of 100,000, and the city of Lysychansk are wedged between Russian forces in Luhansk province.
Valentyna Tsonkan, an elderly resident of Lysychansk, described when her house came under attack.
“I was lying on my bed. The shrapnel hit the wall and went through my shoulder,” she said while being treated for her wounds.
Meanwhile, Russian shelling of the Kharkiv region killed five people and wounded 12 over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian authorities said.
The Russian military said it used high-precision missiles to hit an armor repair plant near Kharkiv. There was no confirmation from Ukraine of such a plant being hit.
More than three months into the war, Russia’s continuing encroachment could open up the possibility of a negotiated settlement between the nations, analysts said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “has the option of declaring his objectives met at more or less any time in order to consolidate Russia’s territorial gains,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at the London think tank Chatham House. At that point, Giles said, Western leaders may “pressure Ukraine to accept their losses in order to bring an end to the fighting.”
Meanwhile, the international nuclear watchdog agency said Wednesday that radiation detectors at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine are online for the first time since the Russian invasion Feb. 24 and that radiation levels are normal.
Russian forces set up encampments and dug trenches in the forests around the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986. Russian troops left March 31.
The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed alarm over the safety of Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. This week, Ukraine also raised renewed concerns about the safety at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, which is under the control of Russian forces.
Ukraine told the IAEA on Monday that it had “lost control over” nuclear material at Zaporizhzhia and data communication with the plant on nuclear safeguards had broken down.