Russia continues to hammer eastern Luhansk
Official: Kremlin orders region to be overrun
KYIV, Ukraine – Russia’s military continued to grind down Ukraine’s defenses Monday, with combat in eastern areas said to be entering a “decisive” phase, as the war’s consequences for food and fuel supplies increasingly weighed on minds around the globe.
In Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, which in recent weeks has become the focal point of Moscow’s attempt to impose its will on its neighbor, battles raged for the control of multiple villages, the local governor said.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said the Kremlin had ordered the Russian military to overrun the entire Luhansk region by next Sunday. Currently, Moscow’s forces control about 95% of the region.
Maliar said in televised remarks that “without exaggeration, decisive battles are taking place” in the area, where Ukrainian forces are desperately trying to avoid being encircled.
“We must understand that the enemy has an advantage both in terms of personnel and weapons, so the situation is extremely difficult. And at this very minute these decisive battles are ongoing at the maximum intensity,” Maliar added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated his plea for more Western weapons to fend off the Russian onslaught.
“We need your support, we need weaponry, weapons that will have better capabilities than the Russian weapons,” he told a forum in Milan that was organized by the ISPI geo-political think tank. He spoke by video link.
Zelenskyy added: “This is a matter of life or death.”
The villages where combat is fierce are around Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities in the Luhansk region yet to be captured by the Russians, according to Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai. Russian shelling and airstrikes on the industrial outskirts of Sievierodonetsk have intensified, he said.
Haidai told The Associated Press on Monday that the situation in Sievierodonetsk was “very difficult,” with the Ukrainian forces maintaining control over just one area – the Azot chemical plant, where a number of Ukrainian fighters, along with about 500 civilians, are taking shelter. The Russians keep deploying additional troops and equipment in the area, he said.
Only a fraction of 100,000 people who used to live in Sievierodonetsk before the war remain in the city, with no electricity, communications, food or medicine. Even so, Haidai said, the staunch Ukrainian resistance is preventing Moscow from deploying its resources to other parts of the country.
The British defense ministry noted that the war is not going all Russia’s way, despite its superior military assets.
Russian ground troops are “exhausted,” the defense ministry said in an intelligence report Monday. It blamed poor air support for Russia’s difficulty in making swifter progress on the ground.
Outgunned in the east
Holed up in a bombed-out house in Bakhmut, Ukrainian troops keep a careful accounting of their ammunition, using a door as a sort of ledger. Scrawled in
chalk on the door are figures for mortar shells, smoke shells, shrapnel shells, flares.
Despite the heavy influx of weapons from the West, Ukrainian forces are outgunned by the Russians in the battle for the eastern Donbas region, where the fighting is largely being carried out by way of artillery exchanges.
While the Russians can keep up heavy, continuous fire for hours at a time, the defenders can’t match the enemy in either weapons or ammunition and must use their ammo more judiciously.
At the outpost in eastern Ukraine, dozens and dozens of mortar shells are stacked up. But the troops’ commander, Mykhailo Strebizh, lamented that if his fighters were to come under an intense artillery barrage, their cache would, at best, amount to only about four hours’ worth of return fire.
Ukrainian authorities say the West’s much-ballyhooed support for the country is not sufficient and is not arriving on the battlefield fast enough for this grinding and highly lethal phase of the war.
While Russia has kept quiet about its war casualties, Ukrainian authorities say up to 200 of their soldiers are dying each day. Russian forces are gaining ground slowly in the east, but experts say they are taking heavy losses.
The United States last week upped the ante with its largest pledge of aid for Ukrainian forces yet: an additional $1 billion in military assistance to help repel or reverse Russian advances.
But experts note that such aid deliveries haven’t kept pace with Ukraine’s needs, in part because defense industries aren’t turning out weaponry fast enough.
“We’re moving from peacetime to wartime,” said Francois Heisbourg, a senior adviser at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research think tank. “Peacetime means low production rates, and ramping up the production rate means that you have to first build industrial facilities. … This is a defenseindustrial challenge which is of a very great magnitude.”