Ukrainian troops have engaged in fierce street fighting with Russian soldiers in the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk, while other towns are under constant shelling, as the Kremlin pushes for control of the eastern Donbas region.
Sievierodonetsk has become the main target of the Russian offensive in the Donbas, as the invasion grinds on in a war of attrition that has seen cities laid waste by artillery barrages.
“In the city, fierce street fighting continues,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Monday.
“They outnumber us, they are more powerful,” Zelenskiy told reporters at a briefing. But Ukraine’s forces have “every chance” of fighting back, he added.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Russia was also throwing troops and equipment into its drive to capture the largest remaining Ukrainian-held city in Luhansk.
In its nightly update, the Ukrainian military said two civilians were killed in Russian shelling in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on Monday and that Russian forces had fired at more than 20 communities.
In addition to artillery shelling, the enemy fired from planes and helicopters in the Donetsk region, Ukraine’s general staff said on Tuesday.
Russia says it is on a mission to “liberate” the Donbas – partly held by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014 – after Ukrainian forces pushed its troops back from the capital Kyiv and second city Kharkiv in the war’s early stages.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Monday that Russian forces were also advancing towards Sloviansk, which lies about 85 km to the west of Sievierodonetsk.
“The front line is under constant shelling,” Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Ukrainian television.
“The enemy is also shelling near Lyman with the aim of wrecking our defensive positions and advancing on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. There is also shelling of Svyatohirsk with the same aim,” he added.
Kyrylenko said efforts were underway to evacuate people from several towns, some under day and night attack, including Sloviansk which has about 24,000 residents still there.
Britain’s defence ministry said on Twitter on Tuesday that Russia’s broader plan appears to be to cut off the Sievierodonetsk area from both the north and the south.
“Russia will almost certainly need to achieve a breakthrough on at least one of these axes to translate tactical gains to operational level success and progress towards its political objective of controlling all of Donetsk Oblast,” it said.
In a move coordinated with the United States, Britain said it would supply Ukraine with multiple-launch rocket systems that can strike targets up to 80 km away, providing the more precise, long-range firepower needed to reach Russian artillery batteries.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv was gradually receiving “specific anti-ship systems”, and that these would be the best way to end a Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports preventing grain exports.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would respond to Western deliveries of long-range weapons by pushing Ukrainian forces further back from Russia’s border.
On Sunday, President Vladimir Putin said Russia would strike new targets if the West supplied longer-range missiles. The same day, Russian missiles hit Kyiv for the first time in more than a month.
