Updates on the 100th day of the invasion
- The Luhansk official says Ukrainian troops have recovered about 20 percent of the Russian-controlled parts of Severodonetsk.
- A driver has been killed and two Reuters reporters have been injured after being attacked.
- The Ukrainian president says he expects more “good news” about Western-supplied weapons.
- Russia convenes a meeting of the heads of the American media in Moscow.
Ukraine said on Friday it had recaptured much of the territory in fierce fighting for Severodonetsk and thwarted Russian troops’ attempt to advance from the devastated eastern industrial city on the 100th day of Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine’s defense minister says troops are already training in Europe to operate new advanced missile systems committed this week by the United States and Britain, which Kyiv hopes will help change the battle for them. .
A war that Western countries believe Russia planned to win in a matter of hours has lasted more than three months at a cost of thousands of lives and a disruption to the global economy. Moscow was driven out of Kyiv and launched another huge assault on the east.
Rejecting Western criticism that the war is to blame for rising world food prices and hurting poor countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied that Moscow is preventing Ukrainian ports from exporting grain.
A woman is seen fleeing a house set on fire by a bombing in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Friday. (Alexei Alexandrov / The Associated Press)
Reuters arrived in Severodonetsk on Thursday and were able to verify that the Ukrainians still had part of the city. Troops headed for a column of black smoke at high speed on roads full of shattered armored vehicles. A soldier sat in the back seat, his face stained with blood from his wounds.
Elsewhere in the city, Ukrainian troops, including foreign volunteers, were unloading weapons from a truck.
“We’re going to push back the Russians. It will take a day, a month or a year,” said Zurab Kakalidze, a 22-year-old Georgian, who said the time period didn’t matter. “We’re on the right side of history.”
On Friday, the Ukrainian leader of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, told national television that Ukrainian troops had recaptured about 20 percent of the territory they had lost to Russian forces in Severodonetsk.
Reuters was unable to independently verify Gaidai’s claim.
Two Reuters reporters were injured and a driver was killed after his vehicle was attacked while trying to reach Severodonetsk from a Russian-backed separatist-controlled area.
Russians “just destroy everything”
Gaidai said the Russians had been bombarding Ukrainian positions for hours and then advanced, only to be repulsed by defenders who had not been injured, before repeating the pattern.
“It’s moving forward, step by step, because with artillery, planes, mortars, they’re just destroying everything,” he said.
A military vehicle driven by members of a unit of foreign volunteers fighting the Ukrainian army is seen on Thursday on a road in Severodonetsk, Ukraine. (Serhii Nuzhnenko)
“But as soon as we have enough long-range Western weapons, we will move their artillery away from our positions. And then, believe me, the Russian infantry will simply be executed.”
Russian soldiers tried to advance towards Lysychansk, across the Siverskyi Donetsk River from Severodonetsk, but were forced to withdraw, the Ukrainian General Staff said.
Need for weapons in Sloviansk
In the neighboring Donetsk province, also the target of Moscow’s eastern offensive, Russian troops were only 15 kilometers from the city of Sloviansk, said regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.
Donetsk will not fall quickly, but it needs more weapons to keep attackers at bay, Kyrylenko said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an overnight speech that Kyiv was expecting more “good news” about foreign weapons following the latest US $ 700 million package of weapons for Ukraine.
“Victory will be ours,” he said on Friday in a video address from outside his Kyiv office to commemorate the 100th day of the war.
An armored vehicle was towed on Friday by a road near the town of Soledar in the Donbas region of Ukraine. (Aris Messinis / AFP / Getty Images)
The weapons package includes four M142 or HIMARS high-mobility artillery rocket systems. Washington said this week that it hoped Ukrainians would need three weeks of training to use rocket launchers, which could launch precision-guided rockets with a range of more than 65 kilometers and could help deny the power advantage. of Russian artillery fire.
U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters that at some point a negotiated deal would be needed in Ukraine, but that in the meantime, the United States would help Ukrainians defend themselves.
Moscow says Western weapons will pour “fuel into the fire,” but will not change the course of what it calls a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of dangerous nationalists.
Despite being expelled from northern Ukraine in March after a failed assault on the capital, Russia still controls about a fifth of the country, with about half seized in 2014 and half captured since launching the his invasion on 24 February.
The crosses mark the sites of the graves in a residential area of Mariupol, Ukraine, as seen in this photo taken on Friday. (AFP / Getty Images)
For both sides, the massive Russian assault on the east in recent weeks has been one of the deadliest stages of the war, with Ukraine saying it was losing between 60 and 100 soldiers a day.
Moscow has made slow but steady progress, squeezing Ukrainian forces into a pocket in the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, but so far has not surrounded them.
TARGET | Living the war in Mykolaiv:
Residents of Mykolaiv on the brink of the razor of the Russian invasion
For the past three months, the city of Mykolaiv has been a barrier between Russian troops in eastern Ukraine and cities such as Odessa in the west. Residents are patient, living on the edge of the razor.
Meanwhile, Kyiv hopes that the Russian advance will leave Moscow’s forces so exhausted that Ukraine can launch counter-offensives and retake territory in the coming months.
Domino effect
The war has had a devastating impact on the global economy, especially for poor countries that import food. Ukraine is one of the world’s leading sources of cereals and cooking oil, but these supplies were cut off from the market by the closure of its ports on the Black Sea, with more than 20 million tonnes of grain stuck in silos.
“Failure to open these ports will lead to famine,” said UN crisis coordinator Amin Awad in Geneva, saying grain shortages could affect 1.4 billion people and lead to mass migration.
UN Chief of Staff Martin Griffiths ended two days of “frank and constructive talks” with Russian officials in Moscow on Friday to facilitate Ukraine’s grain exports from Black Sea ports, he said. a UN spokesman.
The talks came as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres tried to negotiate what he called a “package deal” to resume both Ukrainian food exports and Russian food and fertilizer exports.
Kyiv and its allies blame Moscow for blocking ports, which Ukraine has exploited to prevent a Russian amphibious assault.
Putin blamed Western sanctions and said sanctions should be lifted on Belarus to allow Ukraine to export through its neighbor, a Moscow ally.
A boy is riding a scooter on Friday in front of a destroyed residential building in the city of Irpin, Ukraine. (Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty Images)
Also on Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it was convening U.S. media chiefs in Moscow for a meeting next Monday to notify them of harsh measures in response to U.S. restrictions against Russian media.
Russia has accused Western countries of imposing unfair restrictions on its foreign media, including bans on some state-backed media. Lawmakers last month passed a bill giving prosecutors powers to close foreign media offices in Moscow if a Western country has been “unfriendly” to Russian media.
Washington has imposed sanctions on some Russian state television channels, which it says have spread misinformation to bolster Russia’s war in Ukraine.