Russia yesterday launched artillery and air strikes on the twin cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, hitting a chemical plant where hundreds of civilians were trapped, a Ukrainian official said.
Luhansk Oblast Governor Serhiy Haidai said that Russian forces attacked Sievierodentsk’s industrial zone, and also attempted to enter and blockade Lysychansk.
“There was an air strike at Lysychansk. Sievierodonetsk was hit by artillery,” Haidai said on the Telegram messaging app, adding that the Azot chemical plant in Sievierodonetsk and the villages of Synetsky and Pavlograd and others were shelled.
Photo: AP
He made no mention of casualties at the Azot chemical plant and Reuters could not immediately verify the information.
Haidai said that 17 people were on Friday evacuated from Lysychansk by police officers, rescuers and volunteers.
Ukraine on Friday said that its troops had been ordered to retreat from Sievierodonetsk, a key battleground city, as there was little left to defend after weeks of intense fighting.
“During the last [several] days, an operation was conducted to withdraw our troops,” Ukrainian National Guard spokesperson Kharatin Starskyi said yesterday.
Starskyi, who had been in Sievierodonetsk, told morning television that the flow of information about the withdrawal was delayed to protect troops on the ground.
The retreat marks the biggest reversal for Ukraine since the loss of the southern port of Mariupol last month.
News of the withdrawal on Friday came four months to the day since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops over the border, unleashing a conflict that has killed thousands, uprooted millions and reduced whole cities to rubble.
The latest Russian advances appeared to bring the Kremlin closer to taking full control of Luhansk, one of Moscow’s stated war objectives, and sets the stage for Lysychansk to become the next main focus of fighting.
Vitaly Kiselev, an official in the Ministry of the Interior of the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic — recognized only by Russia — told Russia’s TASS news agency that it would take another week and a half to secure full control of Lysychansk.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, but abandoned an early advance on the capital, Kyiv, in the face of fierce resistance bolstered by Western weapons.
Since then, Moscow and its proxies have focused on the south and Donbas, an eastern territory made up of Luhansk and its neighbor Donetsk, deploying overwhelming artillery in some of the heaviest ground fighting in Europe since World War II.
Russia yesterday again launched missile strikes on military and civilian infrastructure in the north, near Ukraine’s second-biggest city Kharkiv, through to Sievierodonetsk in the east, the Ukrainian Chief of the General Staff office said.
Several regional governors reported shelling attacks on towns across Ukraine yesterday.
Russia denies targeting civilians, but Kyiv and the West say Russian forces have committed war crimes against civilians.
Ukraine on again pressed for more weapons, with Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Valeriy Zaluzhniy telling his US counterpart in a telephone call on Friday that Kyiv needed “fire parity” with Moscow to stabilize the situation in Luhansk.
South of Sievierodonetsk, Ukrainian soldiers also withdrew from the towns of Hirske and Zolote in the face of overwhelming Russian forces, said Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
He said that Ukraine’s military had learned the hard lesson of trying to defend positions at all cost during battles with pro-Russian forces in 2014.
“Now, for the first time, we have a precedent where our boys retreated in an orderly fashion,” he said in an video posted online.
Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba played down the significance of the possible loss of more territory in the Donbas.
“Putin wanted to occupy the Donbas by May 9. We are [there] on June 24 and still fighting. Retreating from a few battles does not mean losing the war at all,” he said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
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