War in Ukraine, Day 54 | Russia has launched the offensive in eastern Ukraine, announces Zelensky

(Novodruzhesk) Russia launched a major offensive in eastern Ukraine on Monday, President Volodymir Zelensky said, with Moscow opening a new phase of its invasion after failing to take the capital Kyiv.

In recent weeks, the Russian military campaign has refocused on the eastern region of Donbass, which has been partially controlled by pro-Russian separatist forces since 2014.

“We can now say that Russian troops have started the battle for Donbass, for which they have been preparing for a long time. A very large part of the entire Russian army is now devoted to this offensive,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech broadcast on Telegram.

“No matter how many Russian soldiers are brought here, we will fight. We will defend ourselves”, he claimed, after having warned the day before that “they literally want to complete and destroy the Donbass”.

For Andriï Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, “the second phase of the war has begun”. “Trust the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” he said on Telegram.

” It’s hell ”

” It’s hell. The offensive has begun, the one we have been talking about for weeks, ”said the Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk region, Serguiï Gaïdaï, on Facebook.

“There is fighting in Rubizhne and Popasna, incessant fighting in other peaceful towns,” he said, acknowledging that Kreminna was “unfortunately under the control of orcs,” the pejorative nickname given to the Russian military.

This city, which had around 18,000 inhabitants before the war, is located about fifty kilometers northeast of Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian capital of the Donbass coalfield.

At least four civilians were killed in Russian shelling as they tried to flee Kreminna, Gaidai said.

However, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych assured that “the Russian occupiers had not yet conquered Kreminna” and that “intense street fighting” was taking place there.

Serguiï Gaïdaï had shortly before urged the population to evacuate the Luhansk region.

Four other people died the same day in strikes on the neighboring region of Donetsk, according to its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Monday asked Moscow to open humanitarian corridors in Berdyansk and Mariupol, in particular at the Azovstal metallurgical complex, where there are fighters but where “many Ukrainian civilians” are also entrenched .

“Your refusal to open these humanitarian corridors will serve, in the future, as elements for legal proceedings against all those involved in war crimes,” she said on Telegram.

The Mariupol City Council claimed on Tuesday morning that Azovstal had been shelled and assured on Telegram that “at least 1,000 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, are in the underground shelters”. of the metallurgical complex.

Russia is determined to seize Mariupol, whose last defenders on Sunday ignored a Russian army ultimatum to lay down their arms.

“Our soldiers are still there. They will fight until the end,” said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Chmygal.

The conquest of this port city would constitute an important victory for the Russians because it would allow them to consolidate their coastal territorial gains along the Sea of ​​Azov by linking the Donbass, partly controlled by their supporters, with Crimea which Moscow annexed in 2014.

Fighting in the South

A senior US Defense Department official said on Monday that Washington found that Russia had increased its military presence in eastern and southern Ukraine by “eleven battalions” in one week, bringing the total to 76. battalions in the country.

The Ukrainian army warned Monday evening of a high threat of bombing in the Mykolayiv region (south).

“The enemy” tried unsuccessfully to dislodge Ukrainian forces around Oleksandrivka, 40 km west of Kherson (south), according to the same source. Five Russian army vehicles, including armored ones, were destroyed and 28 soldiers were killed in the fighting, it added.

In the northeast, three civilians were killed Monday in new bombings against Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city.

Already on Sunday, at least five people had died there in a series of Russian strikes.

In the west, Russian bombing killed seven people on Monday and “eleven injured, including a child”, according to local authorities.

Not far from the city of Lviv, Russia claims to have destroyed a large depot of “foreign armaments, delivered to Ukraine during the last six days by the United States and European countries, which were stored there”.

The governor of the region, Maksym Kozitsky, mentioned four cruise missile launches from the Caspian Sea: three on military installations and one on a garage, which caused fires.

About four kilometers from the center of Lviv, AFP journalists saw the burning garage, with carcasses of cars in a crater near a train track.

Located far from the front, near the Polish border, this town has become a city of refuge for displaced people and had hitherto been little targeted by Russian strikes.

In total, the Russian army claims to have disabled 16 Ukrainian military sites on Monday alone, in particular housing Tochka-U ammunition and tactical missiles. These armaments constitute a major stake, both for Moscow and for Kyiv.

Support for Ukraine, the United States announced on this subject on Monday that the first shipments of their new tranche of military aid (800 million dollars) had just arrived the day before at the borders of this country to be handed over to the Ukrainian army.

The European Union for its part “condemned the continued indiscriminate and unlawful bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure” by Moscow. “There can be no impunity for war crimes”, affirmed the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell.

A brigade accused of distinguished abuses

In this context, Vladimir Putin on Monday awarded an honorary title, in particular for his “heroism”, his “tenacity” and his “great professionalism”, to the 64^and motorized rifle brigade.

However, Ukraine claimed that the Russian forces and in particular this unit had committed a massacre of civilians in Boutcha, on the outskirts of Kyiv.

The discovery in the streets of this locality of corpses of civilians, shortly after the withdrawal of Russian soldiers, had sparked a wave of international indignation in early April. Ukrainian investigators are still working there to gather elements of “war crimes”.

Russia, for its part, assured that the Ukrainian authorities and the Western media had staged the massacre.

Still in Russia, public television (VGTRK) broadcast a video on Monday showing two Britons, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, taken prisoner in the fighting in Ukraine.

With drawn features, they turn to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom they expect to negotiate their release against that of Viktor Medvedchuk, a wealthy Ukrainian businessman close to Vladimir Putin who was recently arrested in Ukraine.

Kyiv for its part broadcast a video of Mr. Medvedchuk in which he says he wants to be exchanged “for the defenders of Mariupol and its inhabitants”.

According to his family, Shaun Pinner is “neither a volunteer nor a mercenary, but officially serves in the Ukrainian army”. After having been in the British army, he had settled in Ukraine where he had married a Ukrainian woman.

On the diplomatic front, President Zelensky said on Monday that he hoped to obtain for his country “in the coming weeks” the status of candidate for EU membership.

Obtaining this status “takes years” but Brussels “really gave us the opportunity to start this procedure within a few weeks or months”, he underlined.

For its part, the United States intends, with its allies, to soon take new economic sanctions against Russia, in particular to “disrupt its military-industrial complex and its supply chains”.