Ukraine is evacuating its troops from Sievierodonetsk, the besieged eastern city that is now 70% controlled by Russian forces, after heavy losses.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of the eastern Luhansk region, said on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces had partially withdrawn from the provincial capital amid heavy bombing and fierce street fighting.
“This is not a betrayal,” he wrote in a post in the Telegram, but is part of a retreat “to more advantageous and pre-prepared positions” while waiting for “Western weapons and preparing for unemployment.”
Russian forces entered Sievierodonetsk, largely evacuated and bombed earlier this week, after being detained for about two months by Ukrainian fighters.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine could lose up to 100 troops a day defending the country’s eastern region just over three months after Russia’s large-scale invasion.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, called the decision to withdraw “strategically sound, no matter how painful.”
They said that “Ukraine must get its most limited resources and focus on reclaiming critical ground”, such as “successfully continuing the Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kherson”, a Russian-occupied city in the south of the country.
Haidai said an undisclosed number of Ukrainian troops had retreated westward across the Siverskyi Donetsk River to the sister city of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk. For weeks they had been the last two strongholds left in Ukraine’s possession in the Luhansk region, which together with Donetsk constitute the eastern end of Donbas.
Ukrainian soldier tries to rescue weapons from Russian tank on Siverskyi Donetsk River © Ivor Prickett / New York Times / Redux / eyevine
The news of Sievierodonetsk’s withdrawal came hours after the United States announced it would supply long-range rocket systems to Ukraine, part of its recently approved $ 40 billion assistance package.
Ukraine has long called for such systems, arguing that they are needed to maintain ground and launch counter-offensives. Newly supplied American rockets have a longer and more powerful range than the shells, lethal drones, and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles that have been supplied so far by Western countries.
“Our president has said many times, if we had received these weapons earlier, the situation would have been different with less occupied regions in the hands of Russia today,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, told the Financial Times.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. decision to send more weapons to Kyiv meant “pouring oil on the fire.” But he declined to say how Russia would respond if Ukraine launched US rockets into Russian territory.
A senior EU official says US long-range missiles could be deployed against Russian warships in the Black Sea as they threaten the ports of Odessa and Mykolayiv, which are within range of Russian missiles. thrown into the sea.
U.S. officials say Kyiv has pledged not to use Washington-supplied long-range rockets for attacks on Russian soil.
On Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Berlin would supply Ukraine with IRIS-T air defense systems, which are more powerful equipment than previously promised.
Speaking on Tuesday, Zelensky said: “If our steps or operations to vacate this or that region cost tens of thousands of our dead, we will wait for the right weapons to save as many of our people as possible.”
After withdrawing from its attempt to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and the northeastern regions at the start of the war, Russia has concentrated most of its forces in the Donbas for the past two months. occupied southern coastal regions, which together account for about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory.
Ukrainian forces are still controlling parts of Donetsk west of Sievierodonetsk, but Russian forces are approaching key cities and the Kyiv army last month withdrew from some previously controlled cities such as Svitlodarsk.
Additional report by Valentina Pop in Brussels and John Paul Rathbone in London