LAST UPDATE | 13 Jun 2022
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR Zelenskyy said the battle for Severodonetsk was taking a “terrifying” toll as Russian forces threaten to take the strategic eastern city.
“The human cost of this battle is very high for us. It is simply terrifying,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address to the Ukrainian people.
“The battle for the Donbas will without doubt be remembered in military history as one of the most violent battles in Europe,” he added.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov last week said up to 100 of his troops were dying daily and 500 sustaining injuries in the intense fighting against Russian troops, in a rare public disclosure of casualty figures.
Zelenskyy on 1 June said his army was losing “between 60 and 100 soldiers” every day.
Russian troops have advanced on Severodonetsk as part of their large-scale offensive in the eastern Donbas region after failing to take the capital Kyiv.
Severodonetsk is the largest city in the eastern Lugansk region, which forms part of Donbas, still under Ukrainian control.
“We are dealing with absolute evil. And we have no choice but to move forward and free our territory,” Zelenskyy added in his Telegram address, calling on the West supply more weapons to the Ukrainian army.
Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday has said Russian forces control 70 to 80% of Severodonetsk but had not encircled or captured it amid fierce Ukrainian resistance.
He added that evacuations from the city and access to it were impossible as the last bridges had been blown up.
Severodonetsk’s twin city of Lysychansk was also coming under intense Russian shelling, Gaiday said.
Lugansk and neighbouring Donetsk make up the mainly Russian-speaking Donbas region, where Ukrainian forces have fought pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.
Ukraine earlier said its forces had been pushed back from the centre of Severodonetsk, where Zelenskyy described a fight for “literally every metre”.
Gaiday said Monday Russian forces were “gathering more and more equipment” to “encircle” Severodonetsk.
Moscow’s troops had “pushed our units from the centre and continue to destroy our city”, he said.
The local Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of civilians have reportedly taken refuge, was being “heavily shelled”, Gaiday added.
Severodonetsk has been “de facto” blocked off after Russian forces blew up the “last” bridge connecting it to Lysychansk on Sunday, Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists, said today.
Ukrainian forces in the area have two choices, he said, “to surrender or die”.
Moscow-backed forces were also carrying out an offensive on the key city of Slovyansk, from “west, north and east”, Basurin said.
The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road for Moscow to Slovyansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in their push to conquer the whole of Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.
Ukrainian forces were fighting for “every town and village where the occupiers came”, Zelensky said Monday in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the 2014 conflict.
The port city in southern Ukraine was captured by Russian troops in May after a weeks-long siege.
“We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said.
Presidential advisor Mikhaylo Podolyak said Monday Kyiv needed more arms deliveries to stop the conflict.
“Being straightforward – to end the war we need heavy weapons,” he said on Twitter.
He listed items he said the Ukrainian army required, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.
Currently, Russia’s massed artillery in the area of Severodonetsk gave it a tenfold advantage, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian military, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said yesterday.
“Every metre of Ukrainian land there is covered in blood – but not only ours, but also the occupier’s.”
In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said Monday.
While in the city of Donetsk, separatist authorities said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market in the Budonivskyi district of the city.
On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv – many using banned cluster bombs – had killed hundreds of civilians.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report on Ukraine’s second biggest city.
Away from the battlefield, World Trade Organization members gathered in Geneva yesterday, with the threat posed to global food security by Russia’s war top of the agenda.
Tensions ran high during a closed-door session, where several delegates took the floor to condemn Russia’s aggression, WTO spokesman Dan Pruzin told journalists.
Just before Russian Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov spoke, around three dozen delegates “walked out”, the spokesman said.
On a farm near the city of Mykolaiv in the south, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo the damage done by Russian troops that passed through the area in March.
“We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,” including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.
The farm’s warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season’s grain but there are no takers.
The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.
Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has prompted Finland and Sweden to give up decades of military non-alignment and seek to join the NATO alliance.
But Turkey is blocking their bids and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said yesterday the issue may not be resolved in time for an alliance summit later this month.
The United States and Europe have sent weapons and cash to help Ukraine blunt Russia’s advance, alongside punishing Moscow with unprecedented economic sanctions.
Russian forces said on Sunday they had struck a site in the town of Chortkiv in western Ukraine storing US- and EU-supplied weapons.
Russia’s defence ministry said the strike destroyed a “large depot of anti-tank missile systems, portable air defence systems and shells provided to the Kyiv regime by the US and European countries”.
The strike – a rare attack by Russia in the relatively calm west of Ukraine – left 22 people injured, regional governor Volodymyr Trush said.
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