Russia claimed on Sunday it had conquered Lysychansk and controlled the entire Luhansk region, a potentially key advance in the battle for Donbass, while strikes left six people dead in Sloviansk, another city in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces and their separatist allies have taken “complete control of Lysychansk and other nearby towns”, an official statement quoted by Russian news agencies said.
According to this press release, Russian Defense Minister “Sergei Shoigu informed [le président Vladimir] Putin of the Liberation of the People’s Republic of Lugansk”, one of the two separatist entities, with that of Donetsk, fighting since 2014 to secede from Ukraine.
AFP was unable to verify this information on the ground on Sunday.
The capture of Lysytchansk, if confirmed by kyiv, would allow Moscow to progress in its plan to conquer all of Donbass, an industrial region in eastern Ukraine that is largely Russian-speaking and partly controlled by separatists. since 2014, and to advance towards the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, further west.
Russian strikes hit several districts of Sloviansk, according to the mayor of this city of around 100,000 inhabitants before the war, Vadym Liakh, who reported on Sunday “six dead and 15 wounded”.
“Multiple rocket launcher fire on Sloviansk, the biggest in a long time. There are fifteen fires,” Vadim Liakh said in a video posted on Facebook.
Tetiana Ignatchenko, a spokeswoman for the Donetsk region to which Sloviansk belongs, reiterated authorities’ appeal to residents to leave the area, as the front line is only a few kilometers away. Sloviansk.
“The city is on fire”
On Sunday morning, the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiï Gaïdaï, had hinted that the Ukrainian forces were rapidly losing ground to the attackers in Lysychansk, which had a population of 100,000 before the start of the war.
“The city is on fire […] the occupiers have probably thrown all their forces on Lyssytchansk” which they are attacking with “a method of incredible brutality”, declared Mr. Gaïdaï, evoking an assault much more violent than on the twin city of Severodonetsk, on the eastern bank of the Donets, which fell at the end of June.
However, in a report released on Sunday, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a research and analysis group, said Ukrainian forces “probably carried out a deliberate withdrawal from Lysychansk, leading the capture of the city by Russia on July 2”.
As early as Saturday, the representative of the separatist army of Lugansk, Andrei Marotchko, had published on Telegram messaging a video supposed to show the town hall of Lysytchansk conquered by Russian forces.
The Russian army also claimed to have shot down three Ukrainian missiles at dawn on Sunday, launched against the town of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, where a local official had previously announced the death of at least four people after attacks. explosions.
“Russian air defenses shot down the three Tochka-U cluster missiles launched by Ukrainian nationalists against Belgorod. After the destruction of the Ukrainian missiles, the debris of one of them fell on a house,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Moscow has repeatedly accused kyiv of hitting Russian soil, particularly in the Belgorod region.
Siversk, about twenty kilometers west of Lyssytchansk, could be the next battle, and the Ukrainian forces seem to want to rely on a line of defense between this city and Bakhmout, in order to protect Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two cities high symbolic value.
Stronger bombardments
Siversk was shelled overnight, residents and a local official told AFP on Sunday. “It was intense and it pulled from all sides,” a woman who had taken refuge in a building cellar told AFP.
“For a week, the bombardments on the city have gradually increased, especially in recent days with heavy artillery”, declared to AFP the first deputy mayor, Ruslan Bondarevskiï, while in the premises of the town hall, boxes of humanitarian aid from the Red Cross were distributed to residents on Sunday.
In Kramatorsk, the administrative center of Donbass under Ukrainian control, a Smerch rocket hit a residential area on Sunday without causing any injuries, according to Mayor Oleksandr Gontcharenko.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city in the northeast, residents were awakened again at 4 a.m. “by Russian rocket attacks”, according to the region’s governor, Oleg Sinegoubov, who also reported “shooting” in the morning in several districts.
On the southern front, the Ukrainian regional operational command indicated that in 24 hours, the Russian army had carried out “nine airstrikes with K-52 combat helicopters and two bombardments on Serpents’ Island”, taken up on Wednesday by kyiv forces in the northwest of the Black Sea.
In Melitopol, a city occupied by Moscow forces, the Ukrainian army “decommissioned” a Russian military base overnight from Saturday to Sunday, according to the mayor in exile of the town, Ivan Fedorov.
Evgueni Balitski, head of the pro-Russian administration of the region, indicated that houses located near the base had been damaged and that shells had “fallen on the territory of the airfield”, while ensuring that he did not there were no injuries.
“Absurd idea”
In an interview with German television ARD on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that an “unconditional surrender [de l’Ukraine, comme l’exige M. Poutine] or an imposed peace [à l’Ukraine n’était] not acceptable “.
“When I talk to Putin, I always tell him: keep in mind that the sanctions we [l’Union européenne, NDLR] imposing on Russia now will remain,” he added, “the idea of an imposed peace is absurd, you should instead focus your efforts on reaching a just settlement with Ukraine.”
In a video message on Saturday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky counted “2,610” towns and villages “under Russian occupation”. But since the start of the war, the Ukrainian army has “managed to free 1027”, he assured.
“Hundreds have been completely destroyed by the Russian army and need to be completely rebuilt,” he added. The question of the reconstruction of the country must be at the heart of an international conference Monday and Tuesday in Lugano, Switzerland.
“It is not only necessary to rebuild everything that the occupiers destroyed, but also to lay new foundations for our life, for a Ukraine, safe, modern”, declared the Ukrainian president, for whom this must go through “colossal investments” and “reforms”.