The heavily contested city of Lysychansk has fallen to Russia. Moscow now also controls the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk.
According to the Russian army, it has captured the strategically important city of Lyssychansk in eastern Ukraine. This means that the entire Donbass region of Luhansk has been “liberated,” the Defense Ministry said in Moscow on Sunday. There was initially no confirmation from the Ukrainian side. Reports from the combat zones can hardly be checked independently. More than 100,000 people used to live in the fiercely contested city. The neighboring city of Sievjerodonetsk had already been conquered by Russia.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has informed President Vladimir Putin, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces, “about the liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” the ministry said. “Successful combat operations of the Russian armed forces together with the units of the Luhansk People’s Republic established complete control over the city of Lysychansk and a number of nearby towns,” Interfax said in the minister’s statement. Within a day, their own troops would have conquered 182 square kilometers in the region.
A few minutes before the minister’s announcement, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashenkov, announced that fighting was continuing in Lysychansk and that the Ukrainian troops there were “completely” surrounded. The Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Gajdaj, wrote in the online service Telegram on Sunday that the Russians had advanced further in Lysychansk.
After the fall of Lysychansk, the way to other cities is free
The city is part of the Sieverodonetsk-Lysychansk conurbation, which has been the subject of a struggle for months. Before the war, a total of 380,000 people lived in the conurbation. Lysychansk is important strategically, but also symbolically. The city was an important industrial center, including for oil processing.
With their fall, Ukraine would have lost the last major city in the Luhansk region. The conquest of the area had been declared by the Russian side as an important war aim from the start. Lysychansk’s neighboring city of Sievjerodonetsk was captured by Russian troops a week ago. Both cities belong to the Luhansk region, one of the two sub-regions of the Donbass. After taking Lysychansk, Russian troops could now also target Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk, the second Donbass sub-region. In 2014, pro-Russian separatists proclaimed self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in parts of both regions.
Source: Stern
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