Russian forces yesterday stepped up their offensive on the last pocket of resistance around Lugansk in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, as the war entered its fourth month.
Since Moscow’s invasion on Feb. 24, Western support has helped Ukraine hold off its neighbor’s advances in many areas, including the capital, Kyiv, but Russia is now focused on securing and expanding its gains in Donbas and the southern coast.
“The coming weeks of the war will be difficult, and we must be aware of that,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday in his nightly address after regional leaders and residents reported heavy bombardments.
Photo: AP
“The most difficult fighting situation today is in Donbas,” Zelenskiy said, singling out the worst-hit towns of Bakhmut, Popasna and Severodonetsk.
The Ukrainian armed forces said on Facebook on Tuesday that Russian forces were conducting non-stop “offensive operations” in the region, adding that “the enemy is exerting intense fire along the entire line of contact.”
Lugansk Governor Sergiy Gaidai said Russia had sent thousands of troops to capture his entire region and that Severodonetsk was under massive attack, warning residents that it was too late to evacuate.
“At this point I will not say: Get out, evacuate. Now I will say: Stay in a shelter, because such a density of shelling will not allow us to calmly gather people and come for them,” Gaidai said on Telegram.
Residents of Bakhmut, a crucial junction that serves as a command center for much of the Ukrainian war effort, spoke of the aerial onslaught they had suffered.
“I looked up from my prayers and heard a frightening sound,” 82-year-old Maria Mayashlapak said next to the splintered remains of her home. “Every day I pray to God asking to avoid injuries. God heard me. God is watching over me.”
Zelenskiy said in his address that Russia had carried out nearly 1,500 missile strikes and more than 3,000 airstrikes against Ukraine in the first three months of the war.
The president earlier warned elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos — from which Russians have been barred this year — that slow-walking military aid was causing unnecessary deaths as Ukrainians are “paying dearly for freedom and independence.”
He said that 87 people had been killed in a Russian attack earlier this month on a military base in the north, in what would be one of the largest single recorded strikes of the war.
Western countries have sent huge amounts of weapons and cash to Ukraine to help it repel Russia’s assault, and punished Moscow with unprecedented economic sanctions.
However, Zelenskiy said via videolink that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved if Kyiv had received “100 percent of our needs at once back in February,” when Russia invaded.
He also ramped up his demands that Moscow be cut off from the global economy.
Meanwhile, Boris Bondarev, a counselor at Moscow’s mission to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, announced he was leaving his job after 20 years of diplomatic service in protest at Russia’s invasion.
In the letter circulated to a number of diplomatic missions in Geneva, he condemned the war as “not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia.”
“Never have I been so ashamed of my country,” he said.
Twenty-one-year-old Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin was on Monday found guilty of war crimes for killing an unarmed civilian and handed a life sentence by a Kyiv court, in the first verdict of its kind since the invasion began.
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