Ukraine said on Sunday that the tactical withdrawal would save the lives of its soldiers who will regroup to launch a counter-attack with the help of Western long-range weapons. However, Moscow said the capture of Lysychansk less than a week after taking neighboring Sievierdonetsk meant it had “liberated” Luhansk. It said it would cede the occupied territories to the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Luhansk People’s Republic, whose independence it recognized on the eve of the war. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register The focus of the battlefield is now shifting to the neighboring Donetsk region, where Kyiv still controls swaths of territory. “If our army commanders withdraw people from certain points on the front where the enemy has the greatest advantage in firepower, and this also applies to Lysychansk, it means only one thing,” Zelensky said in his nightly video on Sunday. “That we will come back thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons.” Zelensky said Russia is concentrating its firepower on the Donbas front, but Ukraine will respond with long-range weapons such as US-supplied HIMARS missile launchers. “The fact that we protect the lives of our soldiers, our people, plays an equally important role. We will rebuild the walls, we will regain the land, and people must be protected above all,” Zelensky said. Since abandoning an offensive on the capital Kyiv, Russia has focused its military operation on the industrial heartland of Donbas that includes the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where Moscow-backed separatist proxies have been fighting Ukraine since 2014. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed President Vladimir Putin that Luhansk had been “liberated”, the defense ministry said, after Russia earlier said its forces had captured villages around Lysychansk and surrounded the city. read more In Sloviansk, west of Lysychansk in the Donetsk region, Mayor Vadym Lyakh wrote on Facebook that heavy shelling on Sunday killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl. read more
KONDYRI CAMPAIGN
Thousands of civilians have been killed and cities leveled since Russia’s February 24 invasion, with Kyiv accusing Moscow of deliberately targeting civilians. Moscow denies this. Russia says what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine is aimed at protecting Russian speakers from nationalists. Ukraine and its Western allies say this is a baseless pretext for blatant aggression aimed at seizing territory. The war in Ukraine has sparked a global energy and food crisis, and Western sanctions against Moscow have fueled Russia’s worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Germany has warned of gas shortages due to reduced supplies from Russia. The head of the energy regulator said the 15 billion euro ($15.64 billion) government credit to buy gas for storage may not be enough, according to an interview with WirtschaftsWoche magazine on Monday. read more While Russia would try to frame its Luhansk advance as a watershed moment in the war, it came at a high cost to the Russian military, said Neil Melvin of the London-based think tank RUSI. “Ukraine’s position was never that it could defend all of this. What they were trying to do is slow down the Russian offensive and inflict maximum damage while massing for a counterattack,” he said. Ukraine has repeatedly called for faster arms supplies from the West, saying its forces are heavily armed.
STRIKES IN KHARKIV
Zelensky’s office said Russian artillery strikes hit residential buildings and farms in the Kharkiv region. Russia’s defense ministry also said on Sunday it had hit military infrastructure in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city in the northeast, where a Reuters reporter said Ukrainian forces were building fortifications after overnight shelling. Outside a school in Kharkiv, some residents threw debris into a large crater created by an early morning rocket strike, while others received help repairing damaged homes. “The wife was lucky she woke up early in the morning because the roof fell right where she was sleeping,” resident Oleksii Mihulin told Reuters. About 70 kilometers (44 miles) from Kharkiv on the Russian side of the border, Russia also reported explosions Sunday in Belgorod, which it said killed at least three people and destroyed homes. read more “The sound was so loud that I jumped, woke up, got very scared and started screaming,” a Belgorod resident told Reuters, adding that the explosions occurred around 3 a.m. (0000 GMT). Moscow has blamed Kyiv for numerous attacks in Belgorod and other regions bordering Ukraine. Kyiv has never claimed responsibility for any of these incidents. read more
MILITARY BASE HIT
Ukraine said its air force had carried out about 15 sorties “in almost all directions of hostilities”, destroying equipment and two ammunition depots. In the Russian-held city of Melitopol in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian forces hit a military logistics base with more than 30 strikes on Sunday, the city’s exiled mayor Ivan Fedorov said. A Russian official confirmed that strikes had hit the city. read more Reuters could not independently verify reports on the battlefield. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report from Reuters offices. Written by Michael Perry. Editing: Simon Cameron-Moore Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
