Kyiv, Ukraine –
Russian forces have pounded the city of Lisychansk and its environs in an all-out attempt to capture the last resistance stronghold in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, the governor said on Saturday.
Ukrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to secure the city and prevent it from falling to Russia, as neighboring Severodonetsk did a week ago. Russia’s defense ministry said its forces had taken control of an oil refinery on the edge of Lisichansk in recent days, but Luhansk Governor Serhii Haidai said on Friday that fighting over the facility was continuing.
“In the last day, the occupiers have opened fire with all available types of weapons,” Haiday said Saturday on the Telegram messaging app.
Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk are the two provinces that make up the Donbass region, where Russia has focused its offensive since pulling out of northern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv in the spring.
Pro-Russian separatists have held parts of the two eastern provinces since 2014, and Moscow recognizes all of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign republics. Syria’s government said on Wednesday it would also recognize the “independence and sovereignty” of the two areas and work to establish diplomatic relations with the separatists.
In Slavyansk, a large city in Donetsk that is still under Ukrainian control, four people were killed when Russian forces fired cluster munitions late Friday, Mayor Vadim Lyakh said on Facebook. He said the affected neighborhoods contained no potential military targets.
The leader of neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally, said on Saturday that Ukraine fired missiles at military targets on Belarusian territory several days ago, but all were intercepted by the air defense system. President Alexander Lukashenko called this a provocation and noted that Belarusian soldiers are not fighting in Ukraine. There was no immediate response from the Ukrainian military.
Belarus hosts Russian military units and was used as a springboard for the Russian invasion. Last week, just hours before Lukashenko was due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian long-range bombers fired missiles into Ukraine for the first time from Belarusian airspace.
Lukashenko has so far resisted attempts to draw his army into the war. But during their meeting, Putin announced that Russia plans to supply Belarus with the Iskander-M missile system and reminded Lukashenko how dependent his government is on economic support from Russia.
Lukashenko on Saturday also said that two Belarusian truck drivers had been killed in Ukraine. Ukraine said the truck drivers were at a gas station when it was hit by a Russian airstrike in March, but Lukashenko claims organs were cut from their bodies to hide evidence that they had been shot.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, investigators were combing through the remains of a Russian airstrike early Friday on residential areas near the Ukrainian port of Odessa that killed 21 people.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said investigators were finding fragments of rockets that struck a residential building in the small coastal town of Sergievka. They were also taking measurements to determine the trajectory of the weapons and “the specific people guilty of this terrible war crime,” she said.
Larisa Andruchenko said she was in the kitchen making tea around 1 a.m. when the blast blew open the doors. At first she thought the propane gas tank had exploded and called her husband into the kitchen.
“And just then the lights went out and it was a nightmare. The two of us are in the kitchen with glass flying, everything was flying,” she said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said three anti-ship missiles hit an “ordinary residential building, a nine-story building” in which about 160 people live. The victims of Friday’s attack also included four members of a family staying at a coastal campsite, he said.
“I emphasize: this is deliberate direct Russian terror, not some mistake or accidental missile strike,” Zelensky said.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that air-launched anti-ship missiles usually lack pinpoint accuracy against ground targets. According to him, Russia probably uses such missiles because of a shortage of more accurate weapons.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said the Russian military is targeting fuel storage sites and military facilities, not residential areas, although rockets recently hit an apartment building in Kyiv and a shopping center in the central city of Kremenchuk.
On Saturday, Kremenchuk Mayor Vitaly Maletsky said the death toll in the mall attack had risen to 21 and that one person was still missing.
Ukrainian officials interpreted the missile attack in Odessa as payback for the withdrawal of Russian troops from a nearby Black Sea island of symbolic and strategic importance in the war that began with Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow described their departure from Snake Island as a “goodwill gesture” to help unblock grain exports.
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