Fighting is still raging in eastern Ukraine. The Russian army bombed Sievierodonetsk on Sunday June 12 to overcome the last resistance in this strategic city in eastern Ukraine. It also announced that it had destroyed supplies of Western arms, vital for kyiv, in the west of the country. Franceinfo takes stock of the situation on the 109th day of this war.
Intense fighting in Sievierodonetsk
In the Donbass coal basin, already partly held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014, Russian forces control the residential area of Sievierodonetsk but are still trying to dislodge Ukrainian fighters entrenched in the Azot chemical plant. The opposing army launches “without success” assaults on Sievierodonetsk, the Ukrainian general staff said on Sunday, which had previously reported intensive shelling to “demoralize” his strengths.
“Russia uses its superiority in numbers and artillery to gradually gain ground in and around Sievierodonetsk”, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. The Ukrainian governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiï Gaïdaï, recognized a situation “extremely difficult”. According to him, Moscow is trying to completely isolate the city by preventing any passage of men or ammunition. The fall of Severodonetsk would open the road to Kramatorsk, where the Ukrainian authorities of the Donetsk region have been based since 2014.
Separatists uphold death sentences for three foreign fighters
The leader of the pro-Russian separatist region of Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, on Sunday ruled out a review of the death sentence for “mercenary” of two British and a Moroccan taken prisoner while fighting with Ukrainian forces in the Donbass, calling the sentence “just”. “They came to Ukraine to kill civilians for money. That’s why I don’t see any conditions for any reduction or modification of the sentence”he justified.
British diplomacy said to itself “dismayed” by the death sentence of Britons Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner and Moroccan Brahim Saadoun, while recognizing that these two nationals “served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and [étaient donc] prisoners of war”, and not mercenaries as the separatist authorities accuse them. The UN has also expressed concern about the fate of these three prisoners.
Bombings in the West
Russian cruise missiles fired Saturday night near Tchortkiv, 140 km north of the Romanian border, injured at least 22, including civilians, and partially destroyed a military site, according to local authorities. Moscow claimed on Sunday that it had destroyed in Chortkiv “a large warehouse of anti-tank missile systems, man-portable air defense systems and shells supplied to the kyiv regime by the United States and European countries”.
The Ukrainian army continues its counter-offensive in the south
In the Kherson region, almost completely occupied since the first days of the invasion, Ukrainian forces have “probably resumed their counter-offensives northwest of the city of Kherson on June 11, further south than their previous operations”according the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his daily video message on Saturday evening that his troops had taken over localities in this southern region of the country, and in that of Zaporizhia, further to the northeast.