Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, reported to Putin on Sunday that Russian forces had “liberated” the entire region after capturing Lysihansk, Ukraine’s last stronghold in Luhansk, the ministry said. Ukraine did not immediately confirm that Russia had taken control of the city, although officials had repeatedly warned in recent days that it could fall after troops withdrew from neighboring Severodonetsk, which is separated from Lysychansk by a river. Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said late Saturday that the Russian river crossing “threatened” Lysychansk. “The city is burning,” wrote Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, in a post on the social networking app Telegram. “The conquerors probably threw all their forces into Lysychansk. They attacked the city with incomprehensibly cruel tactics.” Haidai said the destruction in Lysychansk was even worse than in Severodonetsk, which was largely leveled during the artillery bombardment. Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, said on social media that Lysychansk was attacked “with unfathomably cruel tactics” © AP “If some houses and government buildings survived a month of street fighting, then those same government buildings were leveled after a short period,” Haidai wrote. He said Russian troops were “sustaining significant losses but advancing stubbornly.” Pro-Russian social media accounts posted videos showing Chechen soldiers posing in the center of Lysychansk and a Soviet flag flying from the town hall. The posts were geolocated by open source intelligence and Western analysts. The advance, if confirmed, would mark the first time Russia has taken full control of a Ukrainian region since the first weeks of the war in March. It also puts Russia closer to seizing eastern Ukraine’s Donbas border region, which consists of Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk.
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Putin has claimed the war’s main goal is to “liberate” Donbas, where Russia began waging a separatist proxy war that killed more than 15,000 people in 2014 after a pro-Western revolution in Kyiv. Pro-Moscow social media accounts posted footage of residents claiming to be overjoyed to greet their “liberators”. Ukraine has already evacuated most of the population further west. The industrial area is mainly controlled by Moscow-backed separatist groups, whose independence is recognized only by Russia and Syria. Russia reshuffled its command and turned its focus to an all-out offensive in the Donbass in late March after its initial attempt to seize Kyiv and most of the rest of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River failed. It also controls Kherson and some of neighboring Zaporizhia in the south, as well as parts of Kharkiv in the north of Donbas. On Sunday, Russia claimed that Ukraine launched missile and drone attacks on the border cities of Kursk and Belgorod. The defense ministry said it shot down all the missiles, but shrapnel hit residential buildings in Belgorod, which is just over the border from Kharkiv. Viacheslav Gladkov, governor of Belgorod, said four people were killed in the apparent attack and that dozens of buildings were damaged. He claimed that three of the victims were Ukrainian citizens, who state media said were refugees from Kharkiv. Russia has accused Ukraine of carrying out numerous attacks on border towns and nearby infrastructure for its supply routes since the start of the war. While Ukraine has not admitted to any of the attacks, it has mocked them in social media posts, suggesting that Russia was taking credit for the invasion. Neighboring Belarus, which lets Russia use its territory to attack Ukraine but has so far resisted Putin’s efforts to drag it into war, said on Saturday it had also intercepted Ukrainian missiles fired at military targets. Ukraine has not confirmed those claims, but said it destroyed a Russian base in Melitopol, a town in Zaporizhia, in a rocket attack.
