LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — The fate of Ukraine’s entire Donbas region hinges on the strategic city of Severodonetsk, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned overnight, as he called on defenders to push back against Russian advances that have increasingly darkened the outlook for the eastern part of his embattled country.
The war in Ukraine, which entered its 16th week Thursday, has shifted decisively from attempts to capture the capital of Kyiv and northeastern metropolis of Kharkiv to the eastern industrial heartland, where Russia has long fomented separatism and now controls wide swaths of territory.
Kyiv, where missiles struck suburbs and mass graves were discovered earlier in the war, is welcoming back foreign dignitaries as embassies reopen, and Russian forces have been largely repelled around Kharkiv. But Moscow’s troops occupy the southeastern port city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters held out for weeks in an underground steelworks complex amid sustained assault, and Kherson, the southern coastal city that was the first to fall.
