The Ukrainian army confirmed on Sunday evening its withdrawal from Lyssytchansk, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine whose capture had been claimed a few hours earlier by Moscow, which says it controls the entire Lugansk region.
“In order to preserve the lives of Ukrainian defenders, the decision was taken to withdraw” from the city, the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff announced in a statement.
“Under the conditions of multiple superiority of Russian troops in artillery, air force, missile launching systems, ammunition and personnel, continuing the defense of the city would have had fatal consequences,” the statement added.
After weeks of devastating fighting, the capture of Lyssychansk, which had a pre-war population of 95,000, allows Moscow to make progress in its plan to conquer all of Donbass, an industrial basin in largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. and partly controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
The Russian army will thus be able to advance towards Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two major cities further west, hit on Sunday by rocket fire.
In the morning, the Russian Defense Ministry, quoted by Russian news agencies, announced that the Russian army and its separatist allies had taken “complete control of Lyssytchansk and other nearby towns”.
According to a statement, Russian Defense Minister “Sergei Shoigu informed (President Vladimir) Putin of the liberation of the People’s Republic of Lugansk”, one of the two separatist entities, along with that of Donetsk, fighting since 2014 to make Ukrainian secession.
“The city is on fire”
On Sunday morning, the governor of the Lugansk region, Serguiï Gaïdaï, had indicated about Lysytchansk that “the city is on fire”. According to him, the Russian assault was much more violent than on the twin city of Severodonetsk, on the eastern bank of the Donets, which fell at the end of June.
As early as Saturday, the representative of the separatist army of Lugansk, Andrei Marotchko, had published a video on Telegram messaging which he said showed the town hall of Lysytchansk.
A little 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 “six dead and 15 wounded”.
“Multiple rocket launcher fire on Sloviansk, the biggest in a long time. There are 15 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.
Stronger bombardments
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.
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 said state of “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.
The Russian army said it shot down at dawn on Sunday three Ukrainian missiles 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 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.
“Absurd idea”
In an interview with German television ARD on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that an “unconditional surrender” of Ukraine, as demanded by Vladimir Putin, or “an imposed peace” on Ukraine was not not acceptable.
“When I talk to Putin, I always tell him: ‘Keep in mind that the sanctions that we (the European Union) are imposing on Russia now will remain, the idea of an imposed peace is absurd, you should instead focus your efforts on reaching a just settlement with Ukraine,” he added.
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.
Mr Zelensky met on Sunday with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who promised to increase by 100 million dollars (without specifying if they were Australian or American) his military support for Ukraine, including the delivery of new armored vehicles , during the first visit to kyiv by an Australian head of government.
Mr Albanese also claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin will receive “the welcome he deserves” if he attends the G20 summit in November in Bali, Indonesia.
“If Mr. Putin attends this meeting […]he will receive the welcome he deserves, which is not that of a friend, of someone who respects the international rule of law,” he said.