Severodonetsk was one of the last major strongholds of Ukraine in the area. Serhiy Hayday, a top military commander in eastern Ukraine, said the army made the decision to evacuate “because the death toll in unfortified territories may increase every day.”
“It doesn’t make sense to stay,” Hayday said.
It is unclear whether Ukrainian forces are currently leaving the city or whether they have already evacuated.
While the capture is a symbolic breakthrough for Russia, it comes after a long and costly battle in which Moscow forces clashed with stubborn Ukrainian resistance.
Russian forces have diverted much of their firepower to invade the city, simply destroying all the defensive positions adopted by the Ukrainians. The strategy developed slowly, and the Russians made laborious and slow gains around Severodonetsk during the spring and early summer.
Ukrainian forces were slowly pushing a few square blocks around the Azot chemical plant, where some 500 civilians, including dozens of children, have taken refuge, a scene reminiscent of the siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
With the military evacuation of the city, however, the fate of those at the Azot plant is unclear.
Hayday, the head of the Luhansk regional military administration, has repeatedly accused Moscow of scorched earth tactics, flattening cities without considering the victims as it tries to take them.
“All the city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed,” he said on Friday about Severodonetsk.
The battle now moves across the Siverskyi Donets River to Lysychansk, the last city in Luhansk held by Ukrainian forces. And there are already indications that the Russians will use the same ruthless air bombing tactics to shoot down Ukrainian forces, deploying fighter jets, multiple rocket launch systems and even short-range ballistic missiles.
Ukraine’s control over Lysychansk has become more tenuous in recent days. Russian forces have advanced on several villages south of the city, though not without suffering losses from Ukrainian artillery fire. The Ukrainian army says some Russian battalion tactical groups are consolidating or withdrawing to restore their combat capabilities.
The Institute for the Study of War, an American think tank that is closely following the campaign, said the Russian advance from the south means that “they may be threatening Lysychansk in the coming days while they avoid a difficult opposite crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River “. “
A victory for Putin, but at what price?
Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk together form the Donbass region of Ukraine, an industrial center full of factories and coalfields that has been home to sporadic fighting since 2014, when Russia-backed separatists took control of two territories : the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. The Kremlin has been supporting troops there since 2014, and even began granting passports to residents in 2018, with more than half a million distributed in mid-2021, according to Russian state media. Shortly before invading Ukraine in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the two separatist territories as independent states and ordered the deployment of Russian troops there defying international law.
The capture of Severodonetsk gives Putin a major propaganda victory in a war that, so far, has been marked mainly by Moscow’s military setbacks. A key goal of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” – the Kremlin’s official euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine – was to take control of Donbas.
Experts expected a quick fight in the region, unlike the battles around Kyiv in the early days of the war that lost Russia. The fighting near the Ukrainian capital was mainly urban wars, which allowed the Ukrainian army to obstruct Russia’s advantages in manpower and hardware by keeping the battles in narrower corridors, where the highly motivated fighting force ‘Ukraine could take advantage of its better knowledge of the local environment.
Donbas, however, is a region of plains and open spaces. The battles there have involved long-range weapons, a type of war that favors Russia and its superior power and larger armed forces.
After little success during the first month of the conflict, Russian forces withdrew from the vicinity of Kyiv, regrouped and concentrated in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin’s new offensive to take over the Donbas region was launched on April 18, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia’s progress was initially “slow and uneven,” according to U.S. officials, as it appeared that its army was still learning from its mistakes in the early days of the invasion. The tide began to change in mid-May, when Mariupol, a port city of strategic importance, finally fell completely into the hands of Russian forces after an intense three-month bombing campaign that, according to Ukrainian officials, it left up to 22,000 dead. The fighting there was very similar to the Battle of Severdonetsk, both in terms of Russia’s tactical decisions and with Ukrainian fighters and civilians hidden in structures that, before the war, were used for heavy industry. The Russians then increased the intensity of their bombing to other parts of the Donbas region, a strategy Zelensky compared to genocide.
Eyes move in Donetsk
Some experts have questioned whether Russia’s efforts to take Severodonetsk were strategically worthwhile.
“The loss of Severodonetsk is a loss for Ukraine in the sense that any land captured by Russian forces is a loss, but the battle of Severodonetsk will not be a decisive Russian victory,” the War Institute said.
“Ukrainian troops have managed for weeks to attract substantial amounts of Russian personnel, weapons and equipment to the area and have likely degraded the overall capabilities of Russian forces while preventing Russian forces from concentrating on more advantageous axes of advance.”
If Russian forces capture Lysychansk, and with it the Luhansk region, they will probably concentrate more troops in Donetsk, where progress has gone much more slowly.
The regional military administration of Ukraine says that about 45% of Donetsk is in the hands of Ukrainian forces, including the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
It is unclear whether the losses inflicted on Russian forces in recent weeks will harm their ability and desire to swallow more territory, but the Kremlin has not deviated from its ultimate goal of taking those two cities.
It remains to be seen whether the punishment suffered by Ukrainian units has left them with sufficient resources to launch counterattacks against the Russians.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called for more military aid from their allies. Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on June 14 that the country had received only 10% of the military assistance it had requested.
“No matter how professional our army is, without the help of our Western partners Ukraine will not be able to win this war,” Maliar said.
Ukrainian commanders will now have to decide whether it is strategically worthwhile to continue defending Lysychansk, as Kyiv could leave the city and divert resources for a more consolidated defense of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, the industrial belt of Donetsk.
The Kremlin has not deviated from its ultimate goal of taking all of Donetsk and Luhansk. He now has almost all of the latter. But completing the so-called “special military operation” will probably take many more months, creating a war of attrition.
CNN’s Nathan Hodge, Julia Presniakova, Olga Voitovych, Oleksandra Ochman, Rebecca Wright and Rob Picheta contributed to this report.