(Kyiv) Russian forces achieved major military successes in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, fully capturing, after a fierce battle, the strategic city of Sievierodonetsk and entering the neighboring city of Lysytchansk, at the start of the fifth month of conflict.
Posted at 7:50 a.m.
Updated at 2:23 p.m.
At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country would “in the coming months” deliver to Belarus, from where strikes were carried out against Ukrainian territory, missiles capable of carrying nuclear charges.
It is Iskander-M, said the Russian head of state at the start of a meeting with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Saint Petersburg (north-west of Russia).
In statements that risk further straining relations between Moscow and the West, the two leaders also said they wanted to modernize Belarus’s air force to make it capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
Kyiv had shortly before accused Russia of wanting to “draw” Minsk “into the war” after the firing, according to the Ukrainian army, of 20 missiles from Belarusian soil, as well as planes, on an important Ukrainian military center, in Desna, in the north, on Saturday around 5 a.m. (2 a.m. GMT).
This village in the border region of Cherniguiv, where no casualties have been reported this time, had already been the target, on May 17, of bombardments which had then left 87 dead, according to the Ukrainians.
The first attacks from Belarusian territory had also taken place at the very beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24.
US President Joe Biden left for Europe on Saturday, where he intends to further consolidate, and over time, the ranks of Westerners against Russia.
He must first participate on Sunday in a G7 Summit in southern Germany, where aid to Ukraine will be discussed, then, from Tuesday in Madrid, another NATO.
“The Russians are finishing what they started”
In eastern Ukraine, the Russian army recorded major advances on Saturday.
Sievierodonetsk is “entirely occupied by the Russians”, thus recognized at the end of the afternoon its mayor Oleksandre Striouk, the day after the announcement by the Ukrainian army of its withdrawal from this city of approximately 100,000 inhabitants before the war to better defend the locality of Lyssytchansk, located on the opposite bank of a river, the Donets.
PHOTO ANATOLII STEPANOV, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Police vehicles were positioned to form a barricade as the Russian army gained ground in Lysychansk on June 21.
At the same time, the separatists declared that they had “taken full control of the industrial zone of the Azot factory” in Sievierodonetsk and entered Lysychansk with the Russian military.
“Street fights are currently taking place there,” they added, without confirmation from an independent source being able to be obtained immediately.
Crucial progress on the ground for Russia, which wants to conquer the entire industrial basin of Donbass, already partially in the hands of pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
The Russian army, for its part, said it killed “up to 80 Polish mercenaries” in a bombardment, also destroying 20 armored vehicles and eight Grad multiple rocket launchers in high-precision weapons fire on the zinc plant. Megatex in Konstantinovka, in the eastern Donetsk region.
This information was not verifiable either, while Moscow frequently claims to “eliminate foreign mercenaries” who went to fight in Ukraine.
In Kharkiv (northeast), Ukraine’s second largest metropolis, which has resisted pressure from Russian troops since the start of the offensive, missiles are once again falling daily on the city center.
PHOTO LEAH MILLIS, REUTERS
A man cleans debris from the ground after Russian shelling in Kharkiv.
During the night from Friday to Saturday, one of them hit an administrative building near the hotel where an AFP team was staying and caused a fire, according to the Ukrainian emergency services. The building had been bombed before. “The Russians are finishing what they started,” a soldier on the spot told AFP on Saturday, who did not disclose his identity.
In the south, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday that “more than 300 Ukrainian servicemen and foreign mercenaries and 35 heavy weapons units” had been “liquidated in one day in the Mykolaiv region”.
PHOTO LEAH MILLIS, REUTERS
An administrative building in Kharkiv was again the target of Russian strikes overnight from Friday to Saturday.
“Tactical” withdrawal
In this context, Kyiv castigated the condemnation by the Russians of the green light given Thursday by the EU to Ukraine’s candidacy.
“This only shows Russia’s weakness,” tweeted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
On Friday, Moscow denounced a “geopolitical grab” of the space of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, bringing together several countries of the former USSR) to “contain Russia”, ensuring that “this aggressive approach of the Union Europe has the potential to create new schisms and much deeper crises in Europe”.
The massive bombardments in the East ended up making the Ukrainian soldiers give in, but without necessarily fundamentally changing the situation on the ground, say experts.
“The Ukrainian units are exhausted, bloodless. They had terrible losses with completely neutralized battalions”, explains a high-ranking French officer on condition of anonymity, evoking units of 300 or 400 men of which there remained only about twenty able-bodied.
But, for all that, “the overall vision – a slow war of entrenched positions – has hardly changed”, assures AFP Ivan Klyszcz, researcher at the Estonian University of Tartu. “The withdrawal was probably planned before and can be considered tactical,” he analyzes, stressing that the Ukrainian resistance allowed the army to consolidate its rear.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that no progress had been made on Sweden’s desire to join NATO, after a telephone conversation with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.
Sweden and Finland asked to join the Atlantic Alliance, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but came up against Turkey’s blockage.