Moscow-backed separatists on Friday struck the industrial region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, alleging the seizure of a railway core as concerns grew that besieged cities in the region would suffer the same horrors experienced by the people of Mariupol during the weeks before the port was taken.
Ukrainian officials renewed their calls for more sophisticated Western-supplied weapons. Without him, they said, Ukrainian forces would not be able to stop Russia’s offensive.
Friday’s clashes focused on two key cities: Severodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk.
These are the last areas under Ukrainian control in Luhansk, one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas and where Russian-backed separatists have already controlled some territory for eight years.
Authorities say 1,500 people in Severodonetsk have died since the war began just over three months ago.
“Mass artillery bombardment does not stop, day and night,” Severodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Stryuk told The Associated Press. “The city is being systematically destroyed: 90% of the city’s buildings are damaged.”
Striuk described the conditions in Severodonetsk as reminiscent of the Battle of Mariupol, located in the other Donetsk province of Donetsk. Now in ruins, the port was constantly attacked by Russian forces in a nearly three-month siege that ended last week when Russia demanded its capture. More than 20,000 of its civilians are believed to have died.
Smoke rises in the city of Severodonetsk during bombings in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on Thursday. (Aris Messinis / AFP / Getty Images)
Before the war, Severodonetsk was home to about 100,000 people. There are between 12,000 and 13,000 left, Striuk said, huddled in shelters and largely isolated from the rest of Ukraine. At least 1,500 people have died as a result of the war, now in its 93rd day. The figure includes people killed in bombings or fires caused by Russian missile attacks, as well as those who died from shrapnel wounds, untreated diseases, lack of medicine or were trapped under the rubble, the mayor said.
On Friday, there was an assault in the northeastern part of the city, where Russian reconnaissance and sabotage groups tried to capture the Mir Hotel and the surrounding area, Striuk said.
Traces of Russia’s strategy for the Donbass can be found in Mariupol, where Moscow is consolidating its control through measures that include state-controlled broadcasting programming and revised school curricula, according to an analysis by the ‘Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank. .
General Phillip Breedlove, a former head of the US European Command for NATO, said on Friday during a panel set up by the Washington-based Middle East Institute that Russia appears to have “once again adjusted its their goals, and now, now, they seem to be trying to consolidate and enforce the land they have instead of focusing on expanding it. “
Nikolai Kononenko, 67, opened the door of an anti-aerodic shelter in the village of Mayaky in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Friday. (Andriy Andriyenko / The Associated Press)
But the relentless assaults on the Donbas also indicated Russia’s desire to expand its rule. Ukrainian analysts say Russian forces have taken advantage of delays in Western arms shipments to intensify their offensive there.
LISTENING | Why Ukrainians in the East are changing their minds about Russia:
Nothing is foreign29: 07Is eastern Ukraine turning against Russia?
The Donbas region of Ukraine has traditionally been a bastion of pro-Russian support, but after months of war in the backyard, this previously impregnable loyalty to Russia in the east could be beginning to dissipate. This week, we return to the front lines of the Ukraine-Russia war and explore why some Ukrainians who once dreamed of a Russia-backed future are changing their minds. With: Enrique Menendez, Ukrainian humanitarian aid worker. Mansur Mirovalev, Al Jazeera journalist covering the conflicts in eastern Ukraine.
This aggressive push could be counterproductive, however, seriously depleting Russia’s arsenal. Echoing a statement from the British Ministry of Defense, military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said that Russia was deploying 50-year-old T-62 tanks, “which means that the world’s second largest army has been left without modernized equipment “.
Russia-backed rebels said on Friday they had seized Lyman, Donetsk’s large railway hub north of two more key Ukrainian-controlled cities. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich acknowledged the loss Thursday night, while a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported on Friday that his soldiers had countered Russian attempts to oust them completely.
As Ukraine’s hopes of halting Russia’s advance faded, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pleaded with Western countries for artillery and rocket launch systems: ” Without artillery, without multiple rocket launch systems, we will not be able to push them back, “he said. .
View of a burning industrial building after a Russian military attack in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Friday. (Serhii Nuzhnenko / Reuters)
Just south of Severodonetsk, volunteers were expected to evacuate about 100 people from a smaller town 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 roamed the city and took dozens for the first leg of a long journey west.
“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 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.
Ukrainian bomb disposal and demining teams will clean up a lake and an unexploded ordnance and minefield on Friday in the Kyiv suburb of Horenka. (Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)
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 invading troops out, killed nine people, including a father and his 5-month-old baby, the president said. .
Associated Press reporters saw the bodies of at least two men dead and four wounded 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.
An elderly Ukrainian man walks on Friday next to his badly damaged house in Chernihiv, Ukraine. (Alexey Furman / Getty Images)
Some European leaders sought dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin to alleviate the global food crisis, exacerbated by Ukraine’s inability to ship millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said there had been no progress during Thursday’s talks with Putin.
“If you ask me if there are openings for peace, the answer is no,” Draghi told reporters.
A woman sells fruit on Friday near a building damaged by bombings in Makariv, on the outskirts of Kyiv. (Natacha Pisarenko / The Associated Press)
Moscow has tried to shift the blame for the food crisis to the West, calling on its leaders to lift existing sanctions.
Putin told Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer on Friday that Ukraine should remove the Black Sea mines to allow safe transport, according to a Kremlin reading of his conversation; Russia and Ukraine have exchanged blame for mines near Ukrainian ports.
Nehammer’s office said the two leaders also discussed a prisoner exchange and that Putin said efforts to organize one would be “intensified.”