Ukrainian defenders hold out in Donbas city under heavy fire

Kyiv, May 29 (Reuters) – Ukrainian forces on Sunday resisted a Russian assault on Sievierodonetsk, the largest city they still control in Donbas’s Lugansk region, but withstood heavy artillery shelling, Ukrainian officials said.

The shelling was so intense that casualties and damage could not be assessed, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said. Dozens of buildings have been destroyed in recent days.

“The situation has escalated extremely,” Gaidai said.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has urged the West to provide it with more long-range weapons to turn the tide of the war, now in its fourth month.

The battle for Sievierodonetsk, which lies on the eastern side of the Siverskyi Donets River, has come into the spotlight as Russia makes slow but steady gains in the Donbas, which comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

Russia has concentrated large firepower in a small area, in contrast to earlier phases of the conflict, when its forces were often widely spread out.

Gaidai said Russian forces had dug in at the Myr hotel on the northern edge of Sievierodonetsk.

“They can’t advance further into the city and are taking casualties, but we can’t get them out of the hotel right now,” he said on Telegram on Sunday.

Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said the Russians had not yet succeeded in encircling the city and that the Ukrainian defenders had inflicted “terrible casualties”.

But Ukrainians were also suffering heavy losses, both civilians and combatants, they said in a briefing.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is inflicting unspeakable suffering on Ukrainians and exacting horrible sacrifices from his own people in an effort to take over a city that is not worth the cost, even to him,” they said.

Russia’s fixation on Sievierodonetsk had drawn resources from other battlefronts and, as a result, they had made little progress elsewhere.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine that was aimed at seizing and occupying the entire country has turned into a desperate and bloody offensive to capture a single city in the east while defending significant but limited gains in the south and east,” they said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the military situation in Donbas, parts of which are controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, was very complicated but defenses were holding in several places, including Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.

“It’s indescribably difficult there. And I’m grateful to everyone who resisted this attack,” he said in his late-night video address.

SEND WEAPONS

Zelenskiy also expressed hope that Ukraine’s allies would provide much-needed weapons and expected “good news” in the coming days.

Ukraine has started receiving Harpoon anti-ship missiles from Denmark and self-propelled howitzers from the United States, its defense minister said on Saturday. read more

Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak repeated a call for US-made long-range multiple rocket launchers. US officials have told Reuters such systems are being actively considered and a decision may be made in the coming days.

“It’s hard to fight when you’re attacked 70km away and you have nothing to fight with,” Podolyak posted on Twitter. “We need effective weapons.”

Zelenskiy said in a television interview that he believed Russia would agree to the talks if Ukraine could win back all the territory it has lost since Putin’s February 24 invasion.

Still, Zelenskiy dismissed the idea of ​​using force to take back all the land Ukraine has lost to Russia since 2014, which includes the southern peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Moscow that year.

“I don’t think we can restore all of our territory by military means. If we decide to go down that road, we will lose hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.

Russia says it is conducting a “special military operation” to demilitarize Ukraine and rid it of nationalists who threaten 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 areas of Ukraine or abroad.

Separately, Ukraine’s military command said its forces were counterattacking in the southern Kherson region, most of which is occupied by Russia.

It said in its daily report that it had pushed Russian troops back and forced them into “unfavorable defensive positions” near the Pivdennyi Buh River after a similar counter-attack the previous day on three villages on the border with the neighboring Mykolaiv region.

He did not give more details. Reuters was unable to verify the information.

The Mykolaiv regional administration said residential areas in 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; Written by Angus MacSwan; Edited by Tomasz Janowski

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.