Russian artillery is pounding the eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk as Ukrainian forces wage pitched street battles across the river in Syevyerodonetsk, trying to slow Russian efforts to take the city.
Ukrainian and Russian forces have been engaged in brutal fighting in Syevyerodonetsk for weeks now as Ukraine tries to fend off powerful Russian armor and infantry advances.
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The city has increasingly been reduced to rubble, not unlike what happened with the Russian onslaught of the port city of Mariupol weeks earlier.
Luhansk’s military governor, Serhiy Hayday, said in a Telegram post on June 12 that Lysychansk was under heavy artillery bombardment, and evacuation of civilians was continuing.
Lysychansk is located on the western bank of the Siverskiy Donets River, southwest of the larger city of Syevyerodonetsk.
Hayday said Russian troops controlled around 90 percent of the city, but Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement that Ukrainian forces were holding out in a dwindling number of districts.
An explosion hit the nitrogen chemical plant Azot in Syevyerodonetsk on June 11, and fires were burning there into the evening. Hayday said hundreds of people were sheltering at the plant
Moscow-backed separatist fighters, meanwhile, said they had surrounded the Azot plan and claimed that Ukrainian defenders were trapped there.
“All escape routes are cut off for them,” Rodion Miroshnik, a separatist official in the Luhansk region, wrote on Telegram.
The claims could not be independently confirmed.
The General Staff also said Russian troops had gained a foothold in the village of Bohorodychne, a village on the west bank of the Siverskiy Donets River, about 50 kilometers west of Syevyerodonetsk.
Taking Bohorodychne puts Russia forces in good position to attack a bigger, more important town, Slovyansk.
The destruction of Syevyerodonetsk is reminiscent of what occurred in the port city of Mariupol, where residents and fighters took cover in and below a steel plant there before being surrounded and eventually surrendering to Russian forces.
The port city of Berdyansk, southwest of Mariupol, was rocked by three early morning explosions on June 12, with reports saying an electrical substation was knocked out, leaving much of the city without power.
A top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, meanwhile, forcefully pushed back against a statement by U.S. President Joe Biden, who asserted that before the February 24 invasion, Zelenskiy had “tuned out” U.S. intelligence warnings about an imminent Russian attack.
Mykhaylo Podolyak also criticized Western countries for not supplying Ukraine with heavier weaponry earlier.
“What other countries have done to stop it, knowing Moscow’s plans — a question. If we had started getting heavy weapons in January, the situation could have been different,” he wrote on Twitter.
Another adviser to Zelenskiy suggested that Ukrainian losses since the beginning of the war totaled as many as 10,000.
Oleksiy Arestovych was asked during a televised interview on June 11 about the daily death toll for Ukrainian troops, which other Ukrainian officials say is running around 100 per day.
Based on that number, Arestovych was asked by interviewer Mark Feygin if 10,000 was an accurate figure. “Yes, somewhere like that,” Arestovych replied.
Verifiable figures for the death toll in the war — Russian or Ukrainian — have been difficult to come by. Ukraine has not released any official figures, saying it is a state secret. But Zelenskiy, and other officials, have said repeatedly 100 per day is accurate.
For Russia, meanwhile, Ukraine asserts its death toll has surpassed 30,000. Russia has released no official tally since April, when it said around 1,300 of its troops had died in the war.
Western officials, however, say Russia’s death toll likely exceeds 20,000, which would surpass the entire death toll that the Soviet military suffered in its decade-long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
In his nightly video address to Ukrainians, Zelenskiy renewed his call for Western countries to speed up weapons deliveries.
Ukrainian troops “are doing everything to stop the offensive, as much as they possibly can, as long as there are enough heavy weapons, modern artillery — all that we have asked for and continue to ask for from our partners,” he said.
Zelenskiy asserted Russia wanted to destroy every city in the Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian region that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“Every city, that’s not an exaggeration,” he said. “All of these ruins of once-happy cities, the black traces of fires, the craters from explosions — this is all that Russia can give to its neighbors, to Europe, to the world.”
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on June 11 that Russia was resorting to older, more powerful weapons and missiles because it is running short of more precise modern weaponry.
The ministry said in its daily intelligence briefing that Russian bombers had likely been launching 1960s-era heavy, anti-ship missiles against land targets in Ukraine. The missiles, which can be armed with nuclear warheads, were designed to destroy aircraft carriers.
Germany plans to revise its rules on arms exports to make it easier to arm democracies like Ukraine, Der Spiegel reported on June 10. Berlin was among the largest suppliers of weapons since Russia invaded and has been criticized for being slow to supply the heavy weaponry Kyiv says it needs.
Another German publication, Bild am Sonntag, reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will travel to Kyiv along with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi sometime before the Group of Seven summit set for June 26-28.
German officials said they could not confirm the report.
Ukraine also asked for humanitarian support to combat an outbreak of dysentery and cholera in Mariupol.
