Russian tanks and troops have begun advancing into Sievierodonetsk, the largest city in Donbas still held by Ukraine, bringing fighting street by street as the Kremlin’s forces continue to grind forwards in the east of the country.
Witnesses said Russian tanks were advancing towards the centre of the city one blast at a time, razing everything in their path that remains after intense shelling that Ukrainian authorities have said has led to conditions on the ground reminiscent of Mariupol.
“Unfortunately we have disappointing news: the enemy is moving into the city,” the Luhansk regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, told Ukrainian national television on Monday.
The Russian army “use the same tactics over and over again. They shell for several hours – for three, four, five hours – in a row and then attack. Those who attack die. Then the shelling and attack follow again, and so on until they break through somewhere.”
The battle for Sievierodonetsk, which lies on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River, about 90 miles south of the Russian border, is in the spotlight as Russia makes slow but solid gains in the industrial Donbas, which comprises the self-proclaimed republics in Luhansk and Donetsk.
Witnesses said the city was being bombed “200 times an hour” as Russian forces try to cut off reinforcement lines and surround its remaining Ukrainian defenders.
The city’s mayor, Oleksandr Striuk, confirmed in a telephone interview with the Associated Press that Russian troops had “advanced a few blocks towards the city centre”. He said Ukrainian forces were fighting to push the Russians out in street fighting and that the 12,000-13,000 civilians left in the city were sheltering in basements and bunkers to escape relentless bombardment.
Local authorities estimated that 1,500 civilians had already died in Russian attacks on Sievierodonetsk, including from a lack of medicines. Striuk said the city had “been completely ruined” and that the number of victims was “rising every hour, but we are unable to count the dead and the wounded amid the street fighting”.
Relentless Russian artillery barrages have destroyed critical infrastructure and damaged 90% of the buildings, and power and communications have been largely cut to a city that was once home to 100,000 people.
A French journalist was killed after an armoured humanitarian evacuation vehicle in which he was travelling was hit by shrapnel from a Russian shell in Sievierodonetsk. According to local authorities, shrapnel pierced the vehicle’s armour, killing Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff as he travelled alongside civilians forced to flee Russian bombs. The evacuation was called off after the attack.
Having failed to take the national capital, Kyiv, in the early phase of the war, Russia is seeking to consolidate its grip on Donbas, large parts of which are already controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. It has concentrated huge firepower on a small area – in contrast to the earlier phase of the conflict, when its forces were often spread thinly – bludgeoning towns and cities with artillery and airstrikes.
“They don’t care how many lives they will have to pay for this,” said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his latest national address, referring to Russian forces in the region.
Russia has also stepped up its efforts to take the neighbouring city of Lysychansk, where, according to Gaidai, a Russian shell fell on a residential building over the weekend, killing a child. The two cities sit on either side of the strategically important Siverskyi Donets River.
According to Ukrainian officials, Lysychansk is still under Ukrainian control, while the main road into the two cities has been shelled, but not blocked. The last remaining access and evacuation route, leading south-west towards the town of Bakhmut, remains under Ukrainian control.
The Ukrainian defence ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said Ukrainian troops were doing all they could to prevent Russian forces from completely encircling Sievierodonetsk, which if it fell could help Moscow to consolidate its grip on the Donbas – large parts of which were controlled by Moscow-backed separatists before the 24 February invastion.
“The liberation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, recognised by the Russian Federation as independent states, is an unconditional priority,” Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the French TV channel TF1, adding that other Ukrainian territories should decide their future on their own.
Russian forces are also regrouping to resume their offensive further west in the direction of the Sloviansk region of eastern Ukraine, Motuzyanyk said.
“In Sloviansk, the enemy is regrouping to resume attacks in the direction of Izyum-Barvinkove and Izyum-Sloviansk,” he told a briefing.
In the south of the country, the Russian-appointed mayor of occupied Melitopol said two civilians had been wounded by an explosion that she blamed on Ukraine. No one has claimed responsibility for the explosion, which Halyna Danylchenko denounced as a “cynical terror attack by the Kyiv regime” in remarks broadcast by Russian state television.
Meanwhile, the fate of the the last group of Ukrainian soldiers holed up in the smashed Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, who surrendered on 20 May, hangs by a thread.
According to Yuri Sirovatko, a pro-Moscow separatist official and justice minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk people’s republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian fighters may face the death penalty.
“The court will make a decision about them,” Sirovatko was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency. “For such crimes we have the highest form of punishment in the DNR – the death penalty.
“All the prisoners of war are on the territory of the DNR,” he said, adding that there were about 2,300 soldiers from Azovstal among them.