Ukrainian forces are facing “massive” and relentless artillery attacks in a battleground eastern city, Kyiv said on Tuesday.
Moscow’s troops have been pummeling eastern Ukraine for weeks and are slowly advancing, despite fierce resistance from the outgunned Ukrainian military.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces tightening their grip on Severodonetsk in the Donbas region, its twin city of Lysychansk is now coming under heavier bombardment.
Photo: AFP
“The Russian army is massively shelling Lysychansk,” Sergiy Gaiday, governor of the Lugansk region, which includes both cities, wrote on Telegram. “They are just destroying everything there... They destroyed buildings and unfortunately there are casualties.”
Russian forces have been occupying villages in the area and taking control of the two cities would give Moscow control of the whole of Lugansk, allowing them to press further into the Donbas.
In Lysychansk, a Russian strike had left a gaping hole in a police station and damaged nearby apartment blocks, journalists in the city reported.
The direct hit on the station on Monday wounded 20 police officers, authorities said.
“Partition walls fell down and the doors were blown out,” said a policeman who gave his nickname as Petrovich, showing the damage to the building.
In his daily address on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused the Russian army of “brutal and cynical” shelling in the eastern Kharkiv region.
“The Russian army is deaf to any rationality. It simply destroys, simply kills,” Zelenskiy said.
Fifteen people were killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv on Tuesday, its governor said.
Away from the battlefield, Moscow was locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with EU member Lithuania over the country’s restrictions on rail traffic to the Russian outpost of Kaliningrad.
The territory is about 1,600km from Moscow, bordering Lithuania and Poland.
By blocking goods arriving from Russia, Lithuania says it is simply adhering to EU-wide sanctions on Moscow.
However, Moscow accused Brussels of an “escalation” and summoned the EU’s ambassador to Russia.
The US made clear its commitment to Lithuania as an ally in NATO, which considers an attack against one member an attack on all.
“We stand by our NATO allies and we stand by Lithuania,” US Department of State spokesman Ned Price told reporters in Washington.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
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BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
MIXED SOURCING: While Taiwan is expanding domestic production, it also sources munitions overseas, as some, like M855 rounds, are cheaper than locally made ones Taiwan and the US plan to jointly produce 155mm artillery shells, as the munition is in high demand due to the Ukraine-Russia war and should be useful in Taiwan’s self-defense, Armaments Bureau Director-General Lieutenant General Lin Wen-hsiang (林文祥) told lawmakers in Taipei yesterday. Lin was responding to questions about Taiwan’s partnership with allies in producing munitions at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee. Given the intense demand for 155mm artillery shells in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion, and in light of Taiwan’s own defensive needs, Taipei and Washington plan to jointly produce 155mm shells, said Lin,
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