KRAMATORSK: Ukraine said on Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky described a fight for "literally every metre".
The cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which are separated by a river, have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.
Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said on Monday Russian forces were "gathering more and more equipment" to "encircle" Severodonetsk.
Moscow's troops had "pushed our units from the centre and continue to destroy our city", he said.
The local Azot chemical plant, where hundreds of civilians have reportedly taken refuge, was being "heavily shelled", Gaiday added.
Severodonetsk has been "de facto" blocked off after Russian forces blew up the "last" bridge connecting it to Lysychansk on Sunday, Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists, said on Monday.
Ukrainian forces in the area have two choices, he said, "to surrender or die". Moscow-backed forces were also carrying out an offensive on the key city of Slovyansk, from "west, north and east", Basurin said.
The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road for Moscow to Slovyansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in their push to conquer the whole of Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.
Ukrainian forces were fighting for "every town and village where the occupiers came", Zelensky said in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the 2014 conflict.
The port city in southern Ukraine was captured by Russian troops in May after a weeks-long siege.
"We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine'', Zelensky said. Presidential advisor Mikhaylo Podolyak said on Monday Kyiv needed more arms deliveries to stop the conflict. "Being straightforward — to end the war we need heavy weapons'', he said on Twitter.
He listed items he said the Ukrainian army required, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.
Currently, Russia's massed artillery in the area of Severodonetsk gave it a ten-fold advantage, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian military, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said Sunday. "Every metre of Ukrainian land there is covered in blood — but not only ours, but also the occupier's."
In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said on Monday.
While in the city of Donetsk, separatist authorities said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market in the Budonivskyi district of the city. — AFP
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