Ukrainian troops will have to be withdrawn from the city of Sievierodonetsk, a battlefield mostly occupied by Russia, the regional governor said on Friday.
Some of the most intense fighting of the Russian invasion to date has taken place in Sievierodonetsk, where street-to-street battles have lasted a month as Russia has slowly gained ground.
“Staying in broken positions for many months just for the sake of staying there makes no sense,” Serhiy Gaidai said on television.
He said the city’s troops had already been ordered to move to new positions, but did not indicate if they had already done so or where exactly they were going.
The battle for the city is key for Russia to establish control of the last part of the Luhansk region held by Ukraine. Only the city of Lysychansk will remain in the hands of Ukraine if it falls Sievierodonetsk.
The Luhansk region is one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas, an area that Russia and its separatist allies in eastern Ukraine seek to capture completely as one of their war targets.
“In many ways, the fate of the Donbas is being decided there,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy recently said about Sievierodonetsk.