KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian forces on Sunday resisted a Russian assault on Sievierodonetsk, the largest city they still hold in the Luhansk region of the Donbas, but endured heavy artillery barrages, Ukrainian officials said.
The shelling was so intense it was not possible to assess casualties and damage, Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said. Dozens of buildings have been destroyed in the past few days.
“The situation has extremely escalated,” Gaidai said.
The Ukrainian government meanwhile urged the West to provide it with more longer-range weapons in order to turn the tide in the war, now in its fourth month.
The battle for Sievierodonetsk, which lies on the eastern side of the Siverskyi Donets River, has become the focus of attention as Russia ekes out slow but solid gains in the Donbas, comprising of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
Russia has concentrated huge firepower on a small area, a contrast to earlier phases of the conflict when its forces were often spread thinly.
Gaidai said Russian forces had dug in at the Myr hotel on Sievierodonetsk’s northern edge.
“They cannot advance further into the city and are taking casualties, but we are not able right now to push them out of the hotel,” he said on Telegram on Sunday.
Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said the Russians had still not managed to encircle city and the Ukrainian defenders have inflicted “fearful casualties” on them.
But the Ukrainians were also taking serious losses themselves, civilians as well as combatants, they said in a briefing paper.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin is inflicting unspeakable suffering on Ukrainians and demanding horrible sacrifices of his own people in an effort to seize a city that does not merit the cost, even for him,” they said.
Russia’s fixation on Sievierodonetsk had drawn resources from other battlefronts and as result they had made little progress elsewhere.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine that aimed to seize and occupy the entire country has become a desperate and bloody offensive to capture a single city in the east while defending important but limited gains in the south and east,” they said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the military situation in the Donbas – parts of which are controlled by Moscow-backed separatists – was very complicated but defences were holding up in several places, including Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.
“It’s indescribably difficult there. And I am grateful to all those who withstood this onslaught,” he said in his nightly video address.
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Zelenskiy also voiced hopes that Ukraine‘s allies would provide much-needed weapons and he expected “good news” in the coming days.
Ukraine has started receiving Harpoon anti-ship missiles from Denmark and U.S. self-propelled howitzers, his defence minister said on Saturday.
Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak repeated a call for U.S.-made long-range multiple-rocket launchers. U.S. officials have told Reuters such systems are actively being considered, with a decision possible in coming days.
“It is hard to fight when you are attacked from 70 km away and have nothing to fight back with,” Podolyak posted on Twitter. “We need effective weapons.”
Zelenskiy said in a television interview he believed Russia would agree to talks if Ukraine could recapture all the territory it has lost since the invasion, launched by Putin on Feb. 24.
Still, Zelenskiy ruled out the idea of using force to win back all the land Ukraine has lost to Russia since 2014, which includes the southern peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Moscow that year.
“I do not believe that we can restore all of our territory by military means. If we decide to go that way, we will lose hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.
Russia says it is waging a “special military operation” to demilitarise Ukraine and rid it of nationalists threatening Russian-speakers there. Ukraine and Western countries say Russia’s claims are a false pretext for a war of aggression.
Thousands of people, including many civilians, have been killed and several million have fled their homes, either to safer parts of Ukraine or to abroad.
Elsewhere, Ukraine‘s military command said its forces were counter-attacking in the southern Kherson region, most of which is occupied by Russia.
It said in its daily briefing that they had pushed back Russian troops and forced them to take “unfavourable defensive positions” near the Pivdennyi Buh River after a similar counterattack the previous day in three villages on the border with the neighbouring Mykolaiv region.
It did not give further details. Reuters was not able to verify the information.
The Mykolaiv regional administration said residential areas of Mykolaiv city had been shelled on Sunday morning, killing one civilian and wounding at least six.
(Reporting by Natalia Zinets, Conor Humphries, Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv, David Ljunggren in Ottawa, Lidia Kelley in Melbourne; Writing by Angus MacSwan; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
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