Russian forces are attacking the town of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an attempt to seize the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Luhansk province in eastern Ukraine, the governor said Saturday. A presidential aide said their fate would be decided in the next two days.
For weeks, Ukrainian fighters have been trying to defend the city and prevent it from falling into Russian hands, as happened to neighboring Sievierodonetsk a week ago.
Over the past day, the occupiers opened fire with all types of weapons available, Serhiy Haidai, Luhansk governor, detailed on Saturday on the Telegram messaging app.
A river separates Lysychansk from Sievierodonetsk, and Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said during an online interview late Saturday that Russian forces had managed to cross the river for the first time from the north, creating a threatening situation. He commented that they had not reached the city center, but that control over Lysychansk would be decided on Monday.
Volodymyr Nazarenko, the second-in-command of the Svoboda battalion that took part in the June 24 withdrawal from Sievierodonetsk, said that the Russians had methodically razed the city. He described how the Russian tanks attacked one building after another, advancing after destroying each one.
So they use these tactics where ammunition barrages are used to destroy the city and turn it into a scorched desert, Nazarenko said from the relative safety in Bakhmut, a town to the southwest.
He also said Russian soldiers eliminated any possible defensive positions with constant artillery and burned forests to avoid trench warfare.
Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk are the two provinces comprising the Donbas region, where Russia has focused its offensive since withdrawing from northern Ukraine and the capital, Kiev, in the spring.
Pro-Russian separatists have occupied parts of both provinces since 2014, and Moscow recognizes all of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign republics. The Syrian government signaled Wednesday that it will also recognize the independence and sovereignty of the two areas and work to establish diplomatic relations with the separatists.
In Slovyansk, a major Donetsk city still under Ukrainian control, four people were killed when Russian forces fired cluster munitions Friday night, Mayor Vadym Lyakh said via Facebook. He added that there were no military targets in the neighborhoods that were attacked.
The president of neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally, claimed on Saturday that Ukraine fired missiles at military targets on Belarusian territory several days ago, but all were intercepted by the air defense system. President Alexander Lukashenko called it an act of provocation and noted that there are no Belarusian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military did not issue a response.
Belarus hosts Russian military units and was used as a base for the Russian invasion. Last week, hours before Lukashenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin Russian long-range bombers fired missiles over Ukraine for the first time from Belarusian airspace.
Until now, Lukashenko has resisted efforts to involve his military in the war. But during their meeting, Putin announced that Russia planned to supply Belarus with the Iskander-M missile system and reminded Lukashenko how dependent his government is on Russia’s economic support.
On Saturday, Lukashenko also claimed that two Belarusian truck drivers had been killed in Ukraine. Ukraine claimed the truckers were at a gas station at the time it was hit by a Russian airstrike in March, but Lukashenko claimed that their organs were removed to hide evidence that they had been shot.
On another front, investigators reviewed the wreckage of a Russian airstrike early Friday morning on residential areas near the Ukrainian port of Odessa in which 21 people were killed.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said investigators were recovering fragments of the missiles that hit an apartment building in the small coastal town of Serhiivka. They were also taking steps to determine the trajectory of the weapons and the specific culprits behind this terrible war crime, she said.
