Volunteers were expected to evacuate about 100 people from a smaller town south of Sievierodonetsk on Friday. It was a painstaking process: many of Bakhmut’s evacuees were elderly or ill and had to be taken from apartment buildings with soft bunk beds and wheelchairs.
Minibuses and vans toured the city and picked up dozens for the first leg of a long journey west by car or train.
A Ukrainian soldier is on guard in the village of Mayaky in the Donetsk region on Friday. Credit: AP Photo / Andriy Andriyenko
“Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” said Mark Poppert, an American volunteer who works with the British charity RefugEase. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can.”
In Donetsk, the other province of Donbas, Russian-backed rebels said on Friday that they had taken over Lyman, a large railway hub north of two key cities still under Ukrainian control.
“We have lost Lyman,” acknowledged Ukrainian Presidential Adviser Oleksiy Arestovich. However, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that his soldiers had resisted Russian attempts to drive them completely out of the city.
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Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said Russian forces had taken advantage of delays in Western arms shipments to intensify their offensive in the east, incorporating up to a dozen additional battalion tactical groups.
Throwing so much muscle on the offensive, however, could be counterproductive by seriously depleting Russia’s arsenal. Echoing an assessment by the British Ministry of Defense, Zhdanov said Russia was deploying 50-year-old T-62 tanks, “which means the world’s second largest army has run out of modernized equipment.”
Mykola Sunhurovskyi, an analyst at the Razumkov Center in Kyiv, said that from now on, “It is in Putin’s interest to consolidate the situation that has developed today at the front, uprooting in Ukraine what is still strong, and ensure this line of contact as a position in the (eventual) negotiations.
When Ukraine’s hopes of stopping the Russian advance faded, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pleaded with Western nations: “We need heavy weapons … no artillery, no systems of artillery. we will not be able to launch multiple rockets. “
In his nightly speech to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said harsh words to the European Union, which has not agreed on a sixth round of sanctions including a embargo on Russian oil. Hungary, one of Moscow’s closest allies in the EU, is blocking the deal.
“Every day of delay, weakness, various disputes or proposals to ‘appease’ the aggressor at the expense of the victim are (results in) new Ukrainians killed,” he said. “And new threats for everyone on our continent.”
Zelensky said Russia’s offensive on the Donbas could leave its communities in ashes and accused Moscow of “an obvious policy of genocide” through mass deportations and killings of civilians.
Russian bombings in Kharkiv, a northeastern city that has been under assault while Ukrainian forces keep out invading troops, killed nine people, including a father and his five-month-old baby, the president said. .
AP reporters saw the bodies of at least two men dead and four injured at a central subway station, where the victims were transported as the bombing continued outside.
In the north, neighboring Belarus announced on Friday that it was sending troops to the border with Ukraine, which has raised concerns in Ukraine’s military command. Russia used Belarus as a starting point before invading Ukraine.
European leaders have been talking to Putin to alleviate the growing global food crisis exacerbated by Kyiv’s inability to ship millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products while under attack.
AP
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