Russian forces attacked the city of Lysychansk and its surroundings in an all-out attempt to seize the last resistance stronghold in eastern Ukraine’s Lugansk province, the governor said on Saturday.
Ukrainian fighters have spent weeks trying to defend the city from falling to Russia, as neighboring Sievierodonetsk did a week ago. The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces took control of an oil refinery on the outskirts of Lysychansk in recent days, but Lugansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said on Friday that fighting over the facility was continuing.
“During the last day, the occupants opened fire with all kinds of weapons available,” Haidai said on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday.
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Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk are the two provinces that make up the Donbas region, where Russia has focused its offensive since withdrawing from northern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv in the spring.
Pro-Russian separatists have occupied parts of both eastern provinces since 2014, and Moscow recognizes all of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign republics. Syria’s government said on Wednesday it would also recognize the “independence and sovereignty” of the two areas and work to establish diplomatic relations with the separatists.
In Slovyansk, a major Donetsk city that is still under Ukrainian control, four people were killed when Russian forces fired cluster munitions on Friday night, Mayor Vadym Lyakh said on Facebook. He said the neighborhoods that were targeted did not contain any potential military targets.
The leader of neighboring Belarus, an ally of Russia, claimed on Saturday that Ukraine fired missiles at military targets on Belarusian territory several days ago, but all were intercepted by the air defense system. President Alexander Lukashenko described it as a provocation, noting that no Belarusian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. There was no immediate response from the Ukrainian military.
Belarus hosts Russian military units and was used as a staging ground for the Russian invasion. Last week, just hours before Lukashenko was due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian long-range bombers fired missiles at Ukraine from Belarusian airspace for the first time.
Lukashenko has so far resisted efforts to draw his army into the war. But during his meeting, Putin announced that Russia planned to supply Belarus with the Iskander-M missile system and reminded Lukashenko how dependent his government is on Russian economic support.
Lukashenko on Saturday also claimed that two Belarusian truckers were killed in Ukraine. Ukraine said the truckers were at a gas station when it was hit by a Russian airstrike in March, but Lukashenko said their organs were cut out to hide evidence they were shot.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, investigators sifted through the remains of a Russian airstrike early Friday on residential areas near the Ukrainian port of Odessa that killed 21 people.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said investigators were recovering fragments from missiles that hit an apartment building in the small coastal town of Serhiivka. She was also taking steps to determine the trajectory of the weapons and “the specific people guilty of this terrible war crime,” she said.
Larissa Andruchenko said she was in the kitchen making tea around 1 a.m. when an explosion ripped open the doors. She at first thought the propane tank had exploded and she called her husband into the kitchen.
“And at that moment the lights went out and it was a nightmare. We are both in the kitchen with glass flying, everything was flying,” she said.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said three anti-ship missiles hit “an ordinary residential building, a nine-story building” housing about 160 people. The victims of Friday’s attack also included four members of a family staying at a seaside camp, he said.
“I emphasize: this is direct and deliberate Russian terror, and not a mistake or an accidental missile attack,” Zelenskyy said.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday that air-launched anti-ship missiles are generally inaccurate against ground targets. He said that Russia was probably using such missiles due to a shortage of more precise weapons.
The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed that the Russian military is targeting fuel storage sites and military installations, not residential areas, though missiles also recently hit an apartment building in Kyiv and a shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk.
On Saturday, Kremenchuk Mayor Vitaliy Maletskyy said the death toll in the mall attack had risen to 21 and one person was still missing.
Ukrainian authorities interpreted the missile attack in Odessa as revenge for the withdrawal of Russian troops from a nearby Black Sea island with both symbolic and strategic significance in the war that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Moscow described its departure from Snake Island as a “goodwill gesture” to help unlock grain exports.
© 2022 Associated Press