Ukrainian troops are abandoning the ruined eastern city of Sievierodonetsk to Moscow’s invasion force and reinforcing positions in neighbouring Lysychansk, while hoping a new $450m (€426m) tranche of US military aid will bolster their defence of the Donbas area.
The twin industrial cities have been at the epicentre of fighting for several weeks as Russia focused its firepower on seizing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – which together make up Donbas – after being driven back from Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s biggest cities.
“The soldiers of the armed forces of Ukraine and the national guard have already received orders to retreat to new positions, to new fortified areas,” Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said on Friday.
“It makes no sense to be in positions that have been smashed over many months just for the sake of being there,” he added, explaining that Russian forces had placed powerful missile systems in the area and were firing on key roads from warplanes and helicopters.
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Ukrainian defence ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said “the enemy has significantly increased the number of air strikes” in the area and was now trying “to establish full control over Sievierodonetsk, and conducts offensive operations to try to surround our troops in the area of Lysychansk and to block the main logistics routes”.
Roman Vlasenko, the head of the Sievierodonetsk district administration, said “battles are continuing, certain units have already started to withdraw” from the city.
“I understand that the decision has been taken at the top level. Now defences will be built up around Lysychansk and for control of the Lysychansk-Bakhmut road,” he added, noting that Russian forces enjoyed huge superiority in terms of artillery and air power.
Ukraine hopes western allies will help redress that imbalance, and footage posted on social media on Friday appeared to show two powerful Himars multi-launch rocket systems being fired on the battlefield for the first time since their delivery from the US.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the White House for announcing $450 million in new military aid, which will include four more Himars systems; Britain and Germany have pledged similar launchers, which would place a total of 14 in Kyiv’s arsenal.
[ Himars: What are the advanced rockets the US is sending Ukraine?Opens in new window ]
Russia has vowed to “liberate” Donbas in a war that has killed thousands of civilians and displaced some 14 million since the Kremlin launched its all-out invasion in February.
Moscow said on Friday that its forces had seized control of several more villages in Donbas and succeeded in encircling some 2,000 Ukrainian troops in the area.
It also announced that Dmitry Savluchenko – an official installed by Russia in the occupied city of Kherson in southern Ukraine – had been killed when a bomb blew up his car in the latest attack claimed by Ukrainian guerrillas against a prominent collaborator.
After the EU gave candidate-member status to Moldova and his own country on Thursday, Mr Zelenskiy hailed “the biggest step towards strengthening Europe that could have been made right now … when the Russian war is testing our ability to preserve freedom and unity.”
[ EU grants Ukraine and Moldova membership candidate statusOpens in new window ]
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the decision “an internal European matter” but said it was “very important for us that all these processes don’t bring more problems to us, and more problems to relations between us and those [candidate-member] countries”.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock told a conference on food security that it was vital to find ways to export some 20 million tonnes of grain that were now trapped in Ukraine due to Russia’s naval blockade and bombardment of its Black Sea ports.
“We are working together against Russia’s cynical grain war that threatens to destabilise countries … We will not allow this war to starve the world,’” she said in Berlin, ahead of this weekend’s G7 summit in the city.