Too late to evacuate civilians in face of Russian attack, says Luhansk official

The governor of Luhansk has delivered a warning that it is too late for thousands of civilians to be evacuated from the besieged city of Sievierodonetsk, as it faced an intensive Russian assault to take the city and the parts of the province still held by Ukraine.

Surrounded on three sides by Russian forces who have been attempting to complete their encirclement of the pocket around the city, Sievierodonetsk and the towns and villages to its west have been under intense bombardment in recent days.

Fifteen thousand residents were still believed to be in the city hiding in shelters from what Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, described as “the largest [offensive] on European soil since the second world war” while a defence ministry spokesman said the war was currently in its “most active phase.”

Russian forces have been attempting to cut Ukrainian supply lines to Sievierodonestsk by trying to control key roads to the west.

“At this point I will not say: get out, evacuate. Now I will say: stay in a shelter,” Sergiy Haidai said on his Telegram channel. “Because such a density of shelling will not allow us to calmly gather people and come for them.”

“The enemy has focused efforts on the offensive operation to encircle Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk. Now, with the support of artillery, they are conducting assault operations in the direction of Toshkivka and Ustynivka, near Lysychansk,” Haidai wrote.

Ukraine’s defence ministry reported on Monday that Russian forces were attempting to break through Ukrainian defences around Popasna in an attempt to push west toward Bakhmut, a crucial junction that serves as a command centre for much of the Ukrainian war effort.

“I looked up from my prayers and heard a frightening sound,” said 82-year-old Maria Mayashlapak a resident of Bakhmut which has seen repeated airstrikes. “Every day I pray to God asking to avoid injuries. God heard me. God is watching over me.”

According to the latest intelligence update by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, capturing Sievierodonetsk would put the whole of Luhannsk region under Russian control, an ambition flagged up by Russia last week.

In a further development, the defence correspondent of the Kyiv Independent tweeted late on Tuesday that Ukrainian defenders appeared to have ceded two towns outside the city Horlivka – south of Sievierodonetsk– under “extreme Russian pressure” to retreat to more defensible positions.

NEW COPY That appeared to be confirmed by Serhiy Hoshko, the head of the Svitlodarsk military administration who said Russian forces entered the town and hoisted a Russian flag on the city council building. END NEW COPY

The Donbas, which includes all of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, is Ukraine’s old industrial heartland running from outside Mariupol in the south all the way to the northern border. Predominantly Russian-speaking, almost a third of the area was seized by Russian-backed forces in 2014.

During his Monday night address, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, underlined the violence of the fighting around Sievierodonetsk. “The most difficult fighting situation today is in Donbas,” Zelenskiy said, singling out the worst-hit towns of Bakhmut, Popasna and Sievierodonetsk.

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“The Russian military is trying very hard to show that they allegedly will not give up the captured areas of the Kharkiv region, they will not give up the Kherson region, the occupied territory of the Zaporizhzhya region and Donbas.

“In some places they are advancing, where they are pulling up reserves, where they are trying to strengthen their positions. In the coming weeks, the wars will be difficult, and we must be aware of this.”

Despite the stepped-up Russian efforts in the Donbas, and huge levels of destruction, some western officials pointed to the difficulties being faced by the Kremlin’s forces amid emerging criticism of the conduct of the campaign by Russian military bloggers.

“The Russians are still well behind where we believe they wanted to be when they started this revitalised effort in the eastern part of the country,” the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, said on Friday, describing the Donbas fighting as very dynamic, with small towns and villages changing hands daily.

The lack of resources was underlined last week by an abrupt Russian withdrawal from areas near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city which has been bombarded since the start of the war. Some of those forces apparently were redeployed to the Donbas, but it was not enough to tip the scales on the battlefield.

“They really had to thin out the troops they had around Kharkiv, simply because they’re trying to hold to too much of a line with too few troops,” said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Away from Sievierodonetsk, there was also evidence that Russian forces were working to strengthen their tactical position around Kharkiv, having moved some troops from around the city to redeploy units to the fighting further south.

The latest fighting came as the bodies of more than 200 people have been discovered in the rubble of a high-rise apartment building in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, according to a Ukrainian official.

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said workers found the bodies while digging through a basement underneath the collapsed building.

Agencies contributed to this report