An elderly woman stands in her badly damaged house after she was hit by a rocket in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 22. ARIS MESSINIS / AFP / Getty Images
Russian forces have launched a sweeping attack to encircle Ukrainian troops in twin cities crossing 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’s invasion of Ukraine, authorities in Kharkiv’s second-largest city were expected to open the subway, where thousands of civilians had taken refuge for months under relentless bombing.
The reopening is a symbol of Ukraine’s greatest military success in recent weeks: pushing Russian forces largely out of the reach of Kharkiv’s artillery, as the capital Kyiv did in March.
But the decisive battles of the last phase of the war are still raging further south, with Moscow trying to seize the Donbass region of two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, and capture Ukrainian forces in the pockets of the main eastern front.
The easternmost part of the Ukrainian pocket of Donbass, the city of Severodonetsk on the east bank of the Seversky Donets River and its twin Lisichansk on the west bank, have become the main battlefield there, with Russian forces advancing from three directions to surround them.
“The enemy has focused its efforts on an offensive to encircle Lisichansk and Severodonetsk,” said Sergei Gaidai, governor of Luhansk province, where the two cities are among the last territories still held by Ukraine.
“The intensity of the fire in Severodonetsk has increased many times over, they are simply destroying the city,” he said on television, adding that there were about 15,000 people in the city and that the Ukrainian military continued to control it.
Reuters reporters in Donbass, who reached Bakhmut further west, heard and saw heavy shelling on the Lisichansk highway on Monday. Ukrainian armored vehicles, tanks and missile launchers moved to the front line in buses carrying soldiers.
Further west in Slavyansk, one of the largest cities in Donbass still in Ukrainian hands, air raids sounded on Tuesday morning, but the streets were still busy, with a full market, children riding bicycles. and a street musician playing the violin next to a supermarket.
MURAT YUKSELIR / GLOSS AND POST, SOURCE: GRAPHIC NEWS
Two empty public transport buses were moving to the front line town of Lyman to evacuate civilians from heavy shelling there, accompanied by police and a military car.
Gaidai said Ukrainian forces had driven the Russians from the village of Toshkivka, south of Severodonetsk. This cannot be confirmed independently. Four people were killed in a shelling of a home in Severodonetsk that night.
The battle there is after the surrender last week of the Ukrainian garrison in the port of Mariupol after a nearly three-month siege in which Kyiv estimates that tens of thousands of civilians have died.
Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Ukraine’s Mariupol mayor who now operates outside the Russian-controlled city, said on television that the dead were still among the rubble there.
About 200 decaying bodies were found buried in rubble in the basement of a tall building, he said. The locals refused to collect them and the Russian authorities abandoned the place, leaving a stench in the area.
Russia now controls a continuous part of eastern and southern Ukraine, but has not yet achieved its goal of capturing all of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that the “ruthless” offensive in Donbass shows that Ukraine still needs more Western weapons, especially rocket-propelled grenade launchers, long-range artillery and armored vehicles.
Russia’s three-month invasion, the largest attack on a European country since 1945, has led to more than 6.5 million people fleeing abroad, turning entire cities into ruins and imposing severe economic sanctions on Moscow.
In neighboring Moldova, where a pro-Western government warned of the risk that unrest could spread to a border region controlled by pro-Russian separatists, investigators searched the office and home of pro-Russian former President Igor Dodon.
Local media reported that the searches were in connection with an investigation into alleged corruption and treason. Dodon’s Socialist Party said the accusations against him were baseless.
In Russia itself, where criticism of the war has been banned and independent media shut down, opposition leader Alexei Navalny has used a court video link from a prison colony to condemn “the stupid war your Putin started.”
“A madman stuck his nails in Ukraine and I don’t know what he wants to do with him – this crazy thief,” Navalny said.
At a cemetery near Mariupol, trampling through long rows of fresh graves and makeshift wooden crosses, Natalia Voloshina, who lost her 28-year-old son in the battle for the city, said many of those killed in Mariupol had no one to honor their memory.
“Who will bury them?” Who will put up the slab? ”She asked.
“They have no family.”
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Ukraine’s Donbass industrial region, the focus of recent Russian offensives, has been destroyed, President Vladimir Zelensky said, while some of the world’s richest countries have promised to support billions of dollars in Kyiv.
Reuters
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