Ukrainian forces admitted on Monday that they had abandoned the center of Severodonetsk, following a new Russian offensive on this key city in eastern Ukraine, which the two belligerents have been fighting over for weeks.
“With artillery support, the enemy stormed Severodonetsk, achieved partial success and pushed our units back from the city center. Hostilities are continuing,” said the Ukrainian General Staff in its morning update posted on Facebook.
Sergiï Gaïdaï, governor of the Luhansk region – of which Severodonetsk is the administrative center for the part controlled by the Ukrainian authorities – confirmed that the Ukrainian forces had been pushed back from the center.
“Street fighting continues […] the Russians continue to destroy the city,” he wrote on Facebook, posting photos of devastated buildings in flames.
Pro-Russian separatists fighting with the Russians in this region claimed that the last Ukrainian divisions in Severodonetsk were now “blocked”, after the destruction of the last bridge that led to the neighboring city of Lysychansk.
“They have two possibilities […]surrender or die,” said Édouard Bassourine, spokesperson for the separatists.
Mr. Gaïdaï however denied any blockage.
” Cannon fodder “
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video message on Sunday evening, had described the fighting in Severodonetsk as “very violent”, saying that Moscow was deploying insufficiently trained troops and using them as “cannon fodder”.
The capture of this city would give Moscow control of the Lugansk region and open the way to another large city, Kramatorsk, capital of the neighboring region of Donetsk. An essential step to conquer the entire Donbass basin, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
According to Governor Gaïdaï, Russian bombardments notably targeted the Azot chemical plant, where, according to him, nearly 500 civilians, including 40 children, found refuge, and hit sewage treatment plants in the city.
“We are trying to negotiate a humanitarian corridor” for civilians, “so far without success”, he said on his Telegram account.
In Lysychansk, three civilians, including a six-year-old boy, died in shelling over the past 24 hours, he said.
Tensions at the WTO
On the diplomatic level, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen admitted on Sunday that the Twenty-Seven remained divided on the question of granting Ukraine the status of candidate for EU membership.
” The challenge [sera] to come out of the European Council (scheduled for June 23 and 24) with a united position that reflects the enormity of these historic decisions,” she said, as the Commission must deliver a first opinion on this issue by the end of the week.
For their part, the Member States of the World Trade Organization (WTO) met on Sunday in Geneva in the hope of helping to find a solution to the risk of a serious food crisis that the invasion of Ukraine, whose fertile lands traditionally feed hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Tensions surfaced in a closed-door meeting where delegates took the floor to condemn Russian aggression.
The Ukrainian delegate was greeted with a standing ovation, according to WTO spokesman Dan Pruzin. Then, just before Russian Economic Development Minister Maxim Rechetnikov took the floor, around 30 delegates “left the room”, he said.
Western sanctions on Moscow did not prevent Russia from raking in 93 billion euros in fossil fuel export revenues in the first 100 days of war, most of it going to the EU, report says from an independent research center released on Monday.
Cluster bombs
In Mikolaiv, a major port on the Dnieper estuary in the south, the Russian advance was stopped on the outskirts of the city and the Ukrainian army dug trenches facing the Russians, noted an AFP team.
“The Russians are bluffing. There are many of them, they have a lot of weapons, old and new, but they are not soldiers, ”said Serguiï, 54, a Ukrainian brigade captain, on Sunday, while his comrades in arms fired towards the enemy positions.
In a report published on Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying hundreds of civilians had died in relentless attacks on Kharkiv (northeast), carried out in particular with cluster bombs.
After an in-depth investigation, the NGO says it has found evidence of the use by Russian forces, in seven attacks on neighborhoods of Ukraine’s second city, of 9N210 and 9N235 cluster bombs and mines dispersion, two categories prohibited by international treaties.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday raised the case of a Ukrainian teacher, Viktoria Androucha, 25, whom the Russian forces, accusing her of informing the Ukrainian army, forcibly disappeared after her arrest. end of March.
Ms. Androucha is, like other Ukrainian citizens, now imprisoned in Russia and her lawyer does not have access to her, HRW lamented in a press release, recalling that enforced disappearances are crimes against humanity.
From February 24 to May 10, the UN documented in Ukraine “204 apparent cases of enforced disappearances involving 169 men, 34 women and a boy, the vast majority attributed to Russian” and pro-Russian forces, according to HRW.
Ukrainian justice has opened more than 12,000 war crimes investigations in the country since the start of the Russian invasion, according to the prosecution.
While negotiations between the belligerents are deadlocked, Mikhail Kassianov, the first head of government (2000-2004) of Russian President Vladimir Putin, warned that the head of the Kremlin had other countries in his sights.
“If Ukraine falls, then the Baltic countries will be next” on the list, assured the opponent to AFP. He also said he “categorically” disagreed with the idea that we must avoid “humiliating” Vladimir Putin – as Emmanuel Macron recently suggested.
The French president on Monday asked for a “reassessment” of the 2019-2025 military programming law to “adjust the means to the threats”, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. France has “entered a war economy in which, I believe, we will organize ourselves in the long term”, he declared on Monday.