প্রকাশ: 05/07/2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday declared victory
in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, one day after Ukrainian forces
withdrew from their last remaining bulwark of resistance in the province.
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin in
a televised meeting Monday that Russian forces had taken control of Luhansk,
which together with the neighboring Donetsk province makes up Ukraine's
industrial heartland of Donbas.
Shoigu told Putin that “the operation” was completed on
Sunday after Russian troops overran the city of Lysychansk, the last stronghold
of Ukrainian forces in Luhansk.
Putin, in turn, said that the military units “that took part
in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk, “should rest,
increase their combat capabilities.”
Putin’s declaration came as Russian forces tried to press
their offensive deeper into eastern Ukraine after the Ukrainian military
confirmed that its forces had withdrawn from Lysychansk on Sunday. Luhansk
governor Serhii Haidai said on Monday that Ukrainian forces had retreated from
the city to avoid being surrounded.
“There was a risk of Lysychansk encirclement,” Haidai told
the Associated Press, adding that Ukrainian troops could have held on for a few
more weeks but would have potentially paid too high a price.
“We managed to do centralized withdrawal and evacuate all
injured,” Haidai said. “We took back all the equipment, so from this point
withdrawal was organized well.”
The Ukrainian General Staff said Russian forces were now
focusing their efforts on pushing toward the line of Siversk, Fedorivka and
Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, about half of which is controlled by Russia. The
Russian army has also intensified its shelling of the key Ukrainian strongholds
of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, deeper in Donetsk.
On Sunday, six people, including a 9-year-old girl, were
killed in the Russian shelling of Sloviansk and another 19 people were wounded,
according to local authorities. Kramatorsk also came under fire on Sunday.
An intelligence briefing Monday from the British Defense
Ministry supported the Ukrainian military's assessment, noting that Russian
forces will “now almost certainly” switch to capturing Donetsk. The briefing
said the conflict in Donbas has been “grinding and attritional,” and is
unlikely to change in the coming weeks.
While the Russian army has a massive advantage in firepower,
military analysts say that it doesn't have any significant superiority in the
number of troops. That means Moscow lacks resources for quick land gains and
can only advance slowly, relying on heavy artillery and rocket barrages to
soften Ukrainian defenses.
Putin has made capturing the entire Donbas a key goal in his
war in Ukraine, now in its fifth month. Moscow-backed separatists in Donbas
have battled Ukrainian forces since 2014 when they declared independence from
Kyiv after the Russian annexation of Ukraine's Crimea. Russia formally
recognized the self-proclaimed republics days before its Feb. 24 invasion of
Ukraine.
Since failing to take Kyiv and other areas in Ukraine's
northeast early in the war, Russia has focused on Donbas, unleashing fierce
shelling and engaging in house-to-house combat that devastated cities in the
region.
Russia's invasion has also devastated Ukraine's agricultural
sector, disrupting supply chains of seed and fertilizer needed by Ukrainian
farmers and blocking the export of grain, a key source of revenue for the
country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly
video address, called for immediate economic aid to help the country rebuild
even as fighting continues.
“The restoration of Ukraine is not only about what needs to
be done later after our victory, but also about what needs to be done right
now. And we must do this together with our partners, with the entire democratic
world,” he said.
“A significant part of the economy has been destroyed by
hostilities and Russian strikes. Thousands of enterprises do not work. And this
means a high need for jobs, to provide social benefits, despite the decrease in
tax revenues,” Zelenskyy said.
In its Monday intelligence report, Britain's defense
ministry pointed to the Russian blockade of the key Ukrainian port of Odesa,
which has severely restricted grain exports. They predicted that Ukraine's
agricultural exports would reach only 35% of the 2021 total this year as a
result.
As Moscow pushed its offensive across Ukraine's east, areas
in western Russia came under attack Sunday in a revival of sporadic apparent
Ukrainian strikes across the border. The governor of the Belgorod region in
Western Russia said fragments of an intercepted Ukrainian missile killed four
people Sunday. In the Russian city of Kursk, two Ukrainian drones were shot
down, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
– AP/UNB
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