KYIV/KHARKIV, (Reuters) – Russia launched its long-awaited all-out assault on east Ukraine today, seizing its first town after unleashing thousands of troops in what Ukraine has described as the Battle of the Donbas, a campaign to take two provinces.
Ukrainian officials insisted their troops would withstand the new assault, which they said began overnight with massive Russian artillery and rocket barrages and attempts to advance across almost the entire stretch of the eastern front.
In the first big reported success of Russia’s new assault, Ukraine said the Russians had seized Kreminna, a frontline town of 18,000 people in Luhansk, one of the two Donbas provinces.
Russian forces were attacking “on all sides”, authorities were trying to evacuate civilians and it was impossible to tally the civilian dead, Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Gaidai said.
Moscow gave few details about its new campaign, but Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that “another stage of this operation is beginning”. Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia was “methodically” carrying out its plan to “liberate” Donetsk and Luhansk, provinces which Moscow demands Kyiv cede fully to Russian-backed separatists.
In the ruins of Mariupol, a southeastern port destroyed while withstanding nearly eight weeks of siege, Russia gave the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works an ultimatum to surrender by noon (0900 GMT) or die.
“All who lay down their arms are guaranteed to remain alive,” the defence ministry said, later adding it had opened a corridor so those who surrender could leave. The pro-Kremlin leader of Chechnya, whose forces have been fighting in Mariupol, predicted troops would capture the plant on Tuesday.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Ukrainians in a video address overnight that they would withstand the new advance.
“No matter how many Russian troops they send there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves,” he said.
Driven back by Ukrainian forces in March from an assault on Kyiv in the north, Russia has instead poured troops into the east to regroup for a ground offensive in the Donbas. It has also been launching long-distance strikes at other targets including the capital.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s main eastern city which is close to the supply lines for Russian troops advancing on the Donbas, shells hit the southeastern Nemyshlianskyi district in early afternoon, wrecking one apartment building and damaging others.
Three bodies of people apparently killed by shrapnel lay outside on the pavement. There was no immediate confirmation of overall casualty numbers.
“They are sabotaging the whole city,” said 79-year-old Fyodor Bondarenko, watching as one body was carried into an ambulance while the crump of shelling continued. The air was acrid from the smell of fire from a strike that hit car workshops and storage spaces a kilometre away.
In Russia, the governor of the border province of Belgorod said Ukrainian forces had struck a village wounding three residents.
Ukraine’s top security official, Oleksiy Danilov, said Russian forces attempted to break through Ukrainian defences “along almost the entire front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions”.
The coal- and steel-producing Donbas has been the focal point of Russia’s campaign to destabilise Ukraine since 2014 when the Kremlin used proxies to set up separatist “people’s republics” in parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
Moscow now says its aim is to capture the full provinces on the separatists’ behalf. Ukraine has a large force defending northern parts of the Donbas, and military experts say Russia aims to cut them off or surround them.
After Russia’s heavily armoured assault fell prey early in the conflict to nimble Ukrainian units armed with Western anti-tank missiles, Moscow may now hope a more conventional battle of armies in the Donbas will better favour its firepower advantage.
But Russia still needs to keep its troops supplied across miles of hostile territory, with difficulty moving off road in muddy terrain. For its part, Ukraine has launched counterattacks near Kharkiv in the rear of Russia’s advance, apparently aimed at cutting off supply lines, an echo of the tactics that defeated Russia’s advance on Kyiv last month.
Zelenskiy adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said the new Russian offensive was doomed to fail because Moscow simply did not have enough troops to overrun the defences.
Ukraine’s defence ministry described Russia’s tactics as lifted from Soviet-era textbooks, with mass artillery barrages followed by attempts to encircle Ukrainian troops and capture settlements.
Western countries and Ukraine accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of unprovoked aggression. The White House said U.S. President Joe Biden, who has called Russia’s actions “genocide”, would hold a call with allies on Tuesday to discuss the crisis, including how to hold Russia accountable.
French President Emmanuel Macron said his dialogue with Putin had stalled after mass killings were discovered in Ukraine.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what it calls a special operation to demilitarise Ukraine. It has bombed cities to rubble, and hundreds of civilian bodies have been found in towns where its forces withdrew. It says, without evidence, that signs of atrocities were staged.
Russia has been trying to take full control of the southeastern port city of Mariupol, which has been besieged since the war’s early days, site of the war’s heaviest fighting and worst humanitarian catastrophe.
Tens of thousands of residents have been trapped with no access to food or water and bodies littering the streets. Ukraine believes more than 20,000 civilians have died there. Capturing it would link pro-Russian separatist territory with the Crimea region that Moscow annexed in 2014.
In Russian-held districts reached by Reuters, shell-shocked residents cooked on open fires outside their damaged homes.
