Russian forces are now in control of most of Severodonetsk, the epicenter of the bloody battle for Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region. Street fighting continued on Saturday in the eastern city, where Russian soldiers and Ukrainian troops are still locked in war.
“The situation remains difficult. Fighting continues, but unfortunately most of the city is under Russian control. Some positional battles are taking place on the streets,” said Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Luhansk region, which makes up Donbass along with the neighboring Donetsk region.
The most active areas of combat were Severodonetsk, Popasna and the Siverskyi Donets River area, Haidai said on national television on Saturday, adding that Russian forces were using “highly destructive thermobaric rocket artillery”.
“Unfortunately, enemy artillery is simply dismantling buildings floor by floor that are used as shelters. In that sense, it is difficult because the enemy will be knocked out of a street, and then they will start dismantling neighborhoods house by house with tanks, artillery and grads,” forcing Ukrainian forces in Severodonetsk to continually move to new positions and regroup, he said. the governor.
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In his speech on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised Ukrainian forces in the region, saying he was “proud of our defenders who were able to stop the advance of these hostile people, these occupiers, for many weeks and keep our defense strong.”
Zelensky said the fight for the strategic city could dictate the outcome of the war in the east of the country. “Severodonetsk remains the epicenter of the fighting in Donbas,” Zelensky said earlier in the week.
“This is a very fierce, very difficult battle… Probably one of the toughest in this war,” he added. “In many ways, the fate of our Donbas is being decided there.”
Severodonetsk is in the heart of Donbas, a sprawling industrial region in eastern Ukraine that has seen intermittent fighting since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists seized control of two territories — the self-declared People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Luhansk.
Haidai said on Saturday that Ukraine was still in control of the Azot chemical plant in Severodonetsk, where 800 people are sheltered, after a Russian-backed official said Ukrainian fighters were also trapped there.
“The story about the Azot factory blockade is a complete lie spread by Russian propagandists,” Haidai said on the messaging app Telegram.
Rodion Miroshnik, a Russian-backed leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, said on Saturday that up to 400 Ukrainian fighters were taking refuge in the factory complex, hiding alongside civilians in air-raid shelters, and negotiations for their surrender and the safe evacuation of civilians were in progress.
“The fighters are trying to make demands, that is, to allow them to leave the territory of the chemical plant together with the hostages and to provide a corridor to reach Lysychansk. Such demands are unacceptable and will not be taken into account,” Miroshnik said.
Death toll rises in Mariupol
Further south, in Mariupol, 24 more child deaths were reported by Ukraine’s Attorney General’s Office on Saturday, following Russian bombing during a months-long siege on the southern port city.
The blockade ended last month after Russian forces took control of the Azovstal steelworks, where Ukrainian forces have holed up.
This brings the total number of deaths of minors during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to 287, the prosecutor’s office said in a Telegram post. More than 492 children were injured during the war, according to the statement.
The statement added that the figures are not complete as work is under way to verify child deaths in other places where there is active combat.
The office also said that 1,971 educational institutions were damaged by Russian bombing, with 194 of them completely destroyed.
On May 25, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andrushchenko – who also moved to Ukrainian territory – told CNN that Mariupol city officials believe at least 22,000 residents of the city were killed during three months of war.
The news comes as the city is battling a potential cholera outbreak, according to a British intelligence report published on Friday.
Access to clean water, internet connection and telephone services are unreliable in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, the report said, reflecting Ukrainian authorities’ concerns as Russia struggles to provide basic public services to civilian populations in areas that occupied.
In Saturday night’s speech, Zelensky said that “about 32,000” Russian soldiers had been killed since the invasion began. Earlier on Saturday, the Ukrainian military said the total Russian combat losses since February 24 were “about 32,050”.
THE CNN cannot verify Ukraine’s figures for the number of Russian forces killed in the conflict, and the exact death toll remains unclear.
Source: CNN Brasil
