Following Russia’s latest resounding setback with its loss of the Ukrainian city of Lyman, Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath sources reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the military leadership to use More advanced weapons in military operations.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the main eastern town of Lyman was completely free of Russian forces, a day following Moscow announced that its forces had decided to withdraw from its stronghold north of Donetsk region, which it had controlled for months.
Zelensky (AFP)
Restore new towns
In his Sunday evening speech, Zelensky said that the success of his country’s soldiers was not limited to the restoration of Lyman. He added that the Ukrainian forces liberated the two small towns of Arkhanhelsky and Mirolubivka in the Kherson region.
Ukraine announced on Sunday that it had regained full control of the town of Lyman, a logistics hub in the east of the country, marking Kiev’s biggest battlefield victory in weeks.
This development might form a springboard for further gains in the east while increasing pressure on the Kremlin.
Ukrainian fighter in Lyman
The latest resounding setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin came just a day following he announced the annexation of four regions representing nearly a fifth of Ukraine, including Donetsk, where Lyman is located. Kyiv and the West condemned the move, calling it an illegal farce.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Sunday that Ukraine’s recapture of Lyman and the raising of the Ukrainian flag over civilian buildings on Saturday showed that Ukraine might push back Russian forces, as well as the impact of Ukraine’s deployment of advanced Western weapons on the conflict.
The Russian Defense Ministry said yesterday that it would withdraw its forces from the Lyman region “due to a threat related to its siege”. The ministry did not mention Lyman in its daily update of the fighting in Ukraine on Sunday, although it said Russian forces had destroyed seven artillery and missile weapons depots in the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv and Donetsk.
On the other hand, Zelensky said that the kidnapping of the general manager of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is a Russian terrorist act. “This is yet another example of a clear Russian act of terrorism, for which the terrorist state must be increasingly punished,” he added in the letter.
The state-owned company in charge of the station had said on Saturday that Ihor Murashov had been detained by a Russian patrol, and the International Atomic Energy Agency said Russia had confirmed this.
Repel the Russian advance
In its Sunday evening statement, the Ukrainian military said its forces repelled the Russian advance in several areas – notably in the Donetsk region near Bakhmut and Spirn, within the Donetsk region near Lyschansk, a major hub in the neighboring Luhansk region.
In May, Lyman fell to Russian forces, who used it as a logistics and transport hub for their operations in the northern Donetsk region. Its loss represented Russia’s biggest defeat on the battlefield since Ukraine’s lightning counterattack in the northeastern region of Kharkiv last month.
Serhiy Gaidai, governor of the Luhansk region bordering Donetsk, said that the control of Lyman would be a “key factor” to help Ukraine regain lost lands in his region, which Moscow declared in full in early July following weeks of fierce battles.
The British Ministry of Defense said that Lyman’s importance to operations was due to its control of a major road crossing the Seversky Donets River, behind which Russia is trying to strengthen its defenses.
The ministry added that Russia likely suffered heavy losses during the withdrawal. A Ukrainian military spokesman said yesterday that Russia had between 5,000 and 5,500 soldiers in the city before the Ukrainian attack.
