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Russian forces continue their intensive bombardment of the city of “Severodonetsk”.
On Saturday, Russian artillery heavily bombed areas in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, as fighting intensified for control of the city of “Severodonetsk”, where Russian forces are facing fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces.
Serhiy Gaidai, governor of the Luhansk region, said that Ukrainian forces are making some progress in repelling the Russian offensive. He added that Ukrainian soldiers were able to retake roughly a fifth of the city, a claim that has not been verified.
Speaking to Ukrainian national television, Gaidai said that the Russians “did not control the entire city,” adding, “As soon as we get large quantities of western long-range weapons, we will push back their artillery from our positions. And believe me, then the Russian infantry will flee.”
In his nightly speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied the effectiveness of the Russian army. He said that his performance now is linked only to war crimes, shame and hate, as he put it.
The heaviest fighting is currently centered in Severodonetsk, where Ukrainian forces still control the industrial area of the city, Gidayi says, in a scenario reminiscent of Mariupol, where the steel complex was the last stronghold of Ukrainian forces.
The Ukrainian military said on Saturday that Russia had reinforced its forces in “Severodonetsk” and used artillery to carry out offensive operations in the city. But he said that the Russian forces retreated after their attempts to advance in the neighboring town of Bakmut to block the road to Severodonetsk failed.
He added that he has recovered large parts of the industrial area in the city and is able to hold out for another two weeks.
But Gidayi said it was “unrealistic” to talk about the city’s fall within the next two weeks, despite the deployment of Russian reinforcements.
Gidayi said in a post on social media that four people were killed in the Russian attacks on the region on Saturday, including a mother and a child.
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The industrial zone of the city of “Severodonetsk”, where the fighting is currently concentrated.
Journalists injured
Two Archyde.com news agency journalists were injured Friday and their driver killed when their car came under fire as they tried to reach the city of Severodonetsk from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
The situation in Lysichansk, the twin city of Severodonetsk across the river, is looking increasingly difficult.
The city’s mayor, Oleksandr Zayka, said that about 60 percent of the infrastructure and homes were destroyed, while the Internet, mobile phone networks and gas services were disrupted.
In the city of “Sloviansk”, located in the Donetsk region, about 80 kilometers from the city of “Severodonetsk”, the mayor of the city urged the residents to leave the city in light of the heavy bombardment it is exposed to and the water and electricity cut off.
Pavlo Kirilenko, the regional governor of the region, told Archyde.com that the Russian forces are only 15 kilometers from the city of “Sloviansk”.
Kirilenko added that Donetsk will not fall quickly, but it needs more weapons to repel the attackers.
Student Gulnara Evgaripova told AFP that “the situation is getting worse” in the city of “Sloviansk” as she boarded a bus to leave the city.
“I’m afraid there will be nothing left to go back to,” said another girl, Ekaterina Berdenko, a paramedic.
In the southern Odessa region of Ukraine, a missile hit an agricultural storage unit, injuring two people, a spokesperson for the regional administration said in a post on the Telegram platform.
Two people were killed and at least two people were injured in the Russian bombing of civilian infrastructure in the “Kharkiv” region in northeastern Ukraine, Interfax of Ukraine reported, citing emergency services.
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Ukrainian forces are losing 60 to 100 soldiers daily due to the ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine.
advanced missile systems
Ukrainian officials are counting on the advanced missile systems that both the United States and Britain have recently pledged to provide, to tip the scales in the war in their favour, and Ukrainian forces have already begun training on these weapons.
For its part, Moscow said that Western weapons – a reference to advanced missile systems – would add “oil on the fire” but would not change the course of what it called a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of dangerous nationalists.
While the Ukrainian resistance has forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to limit his immediate war goal to the occupation of the entire Donbass region, Ukrainian officials have said he remains determined to subjugate the entire country.
“Putin’s main goal is the destruction of Ukraine. He does not back down from his goals, despite the fact that Ukraine has won the first stage of this all-out war,” Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Hana Maliar told the national television network.
For his part, a Russian government spokesman said that “certain results” had been achieved in the war and that Moscow would continue its military operations until all of its goals were achieved.
Russia currently controls a fifth of the area of Ukraine, about half of that area it seized in 2014, and the rest it has imposed its control over since it invaded the country on February 24.
For both sides, the massive Russian offensive in the east in recent weeks has been the bloodiest phase of the war, with Ukraine saying it is losing 60 to 100 soldiers a day.
Russia is making slow but steady progress, cramming Ukrainian forces into an enclave in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, but failing to encircle it.
Kyiv hopes that the Russian advance will lead to a sufficient troop drain so that Ukraine can regain control of the regions in the coming months.
The war in Ukraine entered its 100th day on Friday. Thousands have been killed, millions have been uprooted from their homes, and the global economy has been turbulent since the Russian invasion of Ukraine repelled the advance of Russian forces on the capital, Kyiv, during the first weeks of the conflict.
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Poor countries suffer from a grain shortage crisis due to the war in Ukraine.
devastating effect on the economy
The war had a devastating impact on the global economy, especially for poor food-importing countries. Ukraine is one of the world’s main sources of grain and cooking oil, but those supplies have been halted by the closure of the country’s ports on the Black Sea, where more than 20 million tons of grain lie in storage silos.
UN relief chief Martin Griffiths Friday ended two days of “frank and constructive talks” with Russian officials in Moscow about facilitating the export of Ukrainian grain from ports on the Black Sea, a UN spokesman said.
Those talks came as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is trying to broker what he describes as a “package agreement” to resume Ukrainian food exports and Russian exports of food and fertilizer.
Kyiv and its allies blame Moscow, which has imposed a blockade of ports booby-trapped by Ukraine to prevent a Russian amphibious assault. While Putin blames Western sanctions.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin denied on Friday that Moscow was preventing Ukrainian ports from exporting grain, blaming the West for high global food prices.
“We are currently seeing attempts to place responsibility for what is happening in the world food markets, that is, the problems arising in these markets, on Russia,” he said in a speech on national television.
He said the best solution to the problem is for Western sanctions on Belarus, Russia’s ally, to be lifted so that Ukraine can export grain through that country.