The battle for two key cities in eastern Ukraine is approaching a “dreaded climax,” an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as the war in Ukraine enters its fourth month on Friday.
Russia’s efforts to capture Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, the two remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Luhansk, have turned into a bloody war of attrition, with both sides causing numerous casualties. Moscow, over the past two weeks, has made steady gains.
“The struggle is entering a kind of formidable climax,” Oleksiy Arestovych said in an interview Wednesday afternoon.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, one of the two east of Donbas, said Thursday morning that Russian forces had been “successful” in their advances. He added that enemy forces had captured Loskutivka, a settlement south of Lysychansk, which threatened to isolate Ukrainian troops.
“To avoid the encirclement, our command could order the troops to retreat to new positions,” Haidai said in a post to Telegram. Russia’s state news agency Tass quoted Russia-backed separatists as saying Lysychansk was surrounded and cut off from supply after Russia took a road linking the city with Ukrainian-controlled territories.
Meanwhile, it is believed that Russia controls all of Sievierodonetsk with the exception of the Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of Ukrainian civilians and forces are trapped. Images posted on social media on Thursday showed heavy fighting outside the industrial area where the plant is located.
The relentless Russian bombing of the Azot plant echoes the bloody previous siege of Azovstal steel in the southern port of Mariupol, where hundreds of fighters and civilians had taken refuge.
Commenting on Russia’s advances in the east, Zelenskiy said in his nightly video that Russia’s goal was to “destroy the entire Donbas step by step.”
Elsewhere in the country, local officials said Russia continued to hit its cities with rockets.
In the southern city of Mykolaiv, the mayor said Russian missiles fired a day earlier had killed at least one person and damaged buildings, including a school.
The weight of Russia’s bombing outside the Donbas has fallen on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, located just across the Russian border. The war-torn city has suffered some of the most intense bombing since the start of the war after experiencing a relative calm that caused some people to return home.
There is now concern among the Ukrainian army that Moscow is organizing a new attack on Kharkiv, despite a successful counter-offensive that drove Russian troops away from its outskirts earlier this month.
Andrii Mogyla, a member of Ukraine’s armed forces, told CNN on Wednesday that Russia could launch a new assault on the city as early as this week.
While concerns are growing in Ukraine over Russia’s advances in the east and north, the country is likely to receive a moral boost on Thursday, as EU leaders are expected to formally accept Ukraine as a candidate to unite. -be on the block in a symbolic display of Western support. .
The Ukrainian military will also appreciate the announcement made by Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who on Thursday announced that the much-requested Himars long-range rocket systems had begun arriving from the US.
“The Hymars has arrived in Ukraine. Thanks to my colleague and friend, @SecDef Lloyd J. Austin III, for these powerful tools! Summer will be hot for Russian occupants. And the last for some of them.” , the minister said on Twitter.
After weeks of complaints from Kyiv that the West was dragging its feet with the sending of heavy weapons, there are now growing indications that weapons arriving from abroad are beginning to influence the fighting. Ukraine earlier this week destroyed a Russian tugboat near Snake Island with a Harpoon missile and has also carried out its first attack on a Russian oil rig in the Black Sea.
Ukraine has repeatedly indicated that its goal of launching a new counteroffensive to reclaim lost territory in the south, including the Kherson region, where it has made some gains recently, depends on the West’s willingness to supply heavy weapons.
“We need to liberate our land and get the victory, but faster, much faster,” Zelenskiy said in a video address posted early Thursday. “What is needed quickly is parity on the battlefield to stop this evil army and push it beyond the borders of Ukraine.”