Ukraine said its forces were resisting an intense Russian assault on the eastern Donbas region amid heavy artillery fire, but pleaded with the West to supply weapons to help Kyiv change course in the war.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Lugansk region that forms half of the Donbas, said on Sunday that Ukraine had pushed back Russian troops from a road, allowing Kyiv forces to cover the key city of Sievierodonetsk.
Russia is concentrating its efforts on the capture of Sievierodonetsk, the last major Ukrainian-controlled city of Luhansk, as part of an offensive in the Donbas more than three months after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
The city is suffering the worst damage from the war since a Russian siege essentially destroyed the southern port city of Mariupol.
Russia’s advance, however, has slowed despite what Ukrainian forces described as a tactical retreat under heavy artillery bombardment.
Russian forces have surrounded two-thirds of Sievierodonetsk in an attempt to encircle it, but have yet to advance more than a hotel on its outskirts, where Ukrainian forces have caused heavy casualties, Haidai told Ukrainian television.
“They’re hiding out there, but they can’t move forward,” he said.
The siege of Sievierodonetsk, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says his forces are outnumbered by 20 to one, marks a strategic shift by Moscow to overwhelm smaller resistance bags one by one. , after Russian forces were forced to withdraw from central Ukraine and expelled again. the Kharkiv border region north of the Donbas.
In a speech on Saturday night, Zelensky said that “the situation is very complicated” in the region, “where the Russian army is trying to get at least some results on its own.” The President of Ukraine described the conditions as “indescribably difficult”.
Ukraine still believes it can reclaim the area once it obtains more supplies of weapons from the west and can overtake Russia in a long-range artillery contest.
“Every day we are approaching the time when our army will overtake the occupants technologically and with firepower,” Zelensky said, adding that he was expecting “good news” about Western supplies next week.
Ukraine said it had received Danish-made Harpoon anti-aircraft missile missiles and US shells, but that it was awaiting approval for multiple rocket launchers, which would allow Kyiv to go much further to hit Russia’s supply lines.
“It’s hard to fight when you’re attacked from a distance of 70 kilometers and you have nothing to fight with,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have failed after Putin hardened his desire to capture more territory and annex areas that his forces have already captured in the southeast.
In an 80-minute phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the collapse of talks and said Russia was open to further negotiations.
But Macron and Scholz told Putin that a negotiated end to the war must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Zelensky told Dutch television that Ukraine wanted to regain territory it had lost to Russia since the invasion, including most of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, as well as parts of the Donbas, before resuming negotiations.
“I don’t think we can return our entire territory entirely by military means,” including the Crimean peninsula and the separatist areas of Donbass that Russia seized in 2014, he said. “If we decide to go this route, we will lose hundreds of thousands of people.”
Capturing all of Luhansk, which forms half of the Donbass along with neighboring Donetsk, would mark a propaganda coup for Putin, who has framed the war as an attempt to “liberate” Russian speakers there.
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Russia diverted most of its forces to the area when a series of humiliating defeats on the battlefield forced it to reduce its ambitions.
Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for War Study said any Russian victory in Luhansk would likely be Pyrrhic.
“Putin is throwing men and ammunition at the last major population center left [ . . . ] as if taking him would win the war for the Kremlin. He’s wrong, “they wrote.
The brutal war of attrition had reduced both Russia’s personnel and firepower, they added. to restart your operations “. counter-offensive level to push back Russian forces. “