The Ukrainian military said on June 13 that its forces were pushed back from the center of Syevyerodonetsk, the Donbas city for whose control the Ukrainian and Russian forces were engaged in a ferocious battle.
Russian forces shelled the city center with artillery and drove out the remaining Ukrainian soldiers there, the general staff in Kyiv said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said several hours before that defenders were fighting for “every meter” in the key eastern city even as the Russians blew up a key bridge, cutting off a potential escape route for civilians and soldiers.
“The key tactical goal of the occupiers has not changed. They are pressing in Syevyerodonetsk, severe fighting is ongoing there — literally for every meter,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, adding that Russia’s military was trying to pour reserves into the Donbas.
Zelenskiy said Russia was deploying undertrained troops and using its young men as “cannon fodder” in the “very fierce” battle.
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“Every meter of Ukrainian land there is covered in blood — but not only ours, also the occupier’s.”
Serhiy Hayday, the regional military governor for Ukraine, said on June 12 that Russian forces had blown up the second of three bridges linking besieged Syevyerodonetsk with its twin city of Lysychansk across the Siverskiy Donets River.
The British Defense Ministry said in its daily intelligence bulletin on June 13 that in the coming months, river crossing operations “are likely to be amongst the most important determining factors in the course of the war.”
The British intelligence said Russia has so far struggled to demonstrate the “complex coordination necessary to conduct successful, large scale river crossings under fire.”
Despite the increasingly difficult situation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy remained defiant, saying that Ukrainian forces have prevented Russian troops from quickly overrunning eastern Ukraine.
“Remember how in Russia, in the beginning of May, they hoped to seize all of the [eastern Ukrainian region of] Donbas?” Zelenskiy said. “It’s already the 108th day of the war, already June. Donbas is holding on.”
Syevyerodonetsk has been the focal point of recent fighting that Kyiv has said could determine the outcome of the war, which began on February 24 with Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The city itself has been all but turned into rubble by the Russian forces’ shelling, with the situation resembling conditions seen at the southern port of Mariupol, which fell to Russian forces after a long, bloody battle last month.
Hayday said the destruction of the bridge across the Siverskiy Donets River leaves just one transit route remaining to allow a potential evacuation of civilians and a withdrawal of troops from Syevyerodonetsk to Lysychansk.
An explosion hit the Azot nitrogen chemical plant in Syevyerodonetsk on June 11 where hundreds of people were sheltering, Hayday said.
Moscow-backed separatist fighters, meanwhile, said they had surrounded the plant and claimed that Ukrainian defenders were trapped there.
The claims could not be independently confirmed.
Ukraine’s General Staff also said Russia troops had gained a foothold in the village of Bohorodychne, a village on the west bank of Siverskiy Donets River, about 50 kilometers west of Syevyerodonetsk.
Taking Bohorodychne puts Russian forces in good position to attack Slovyansk, a bigger, more important town.
In the western region of Ternopil, at least 22 people were wounded when four Russian cruise missile hit a military installation and some residential buildings, the regional governor said on June 12.
A top adviser to 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.
In his post on Twitter, 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.
In his nightly video address to Ukrainians, Zelenskiy renewed his call for Western countries to speed deliveries of weapons.
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.”
