Russian artillery is hitting an industrial zone where 500 civilians are sheltering in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor has said, with all bridges out of the city destroyed, as fears grow for those who have not yet managed to leave.
“All bridges are destroyed,” Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said in a video address on Monday evening, adding that Russia had not “completely captured” Sievierodonetsk and “a part of the city” was under Ukrainian control.
Earlier in the day, Haidai said Russians were continuing to storm the embattled city and, “having a significant advantage in artillery”, had pushed back Ukrainian soldiers. “The Russians are destroying quarter after quarter,” he said, adding that the Russian army had been “partially successful at night” and controlled 70% of the city.
The destruction by Russian forces of the remaining two bridges over the Siverskyi Donets River over the last two days leaves stranded civilians with no escape west to the neighbouring city of Lysychansk, which is also being shelled but remains in Ukrainian hands.
“Evacuation and transport of human cargo is now impossible,” Haidai said.
Addressing the nation in his nightly video address, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the country was “dealing with absolute evil”.
“The human cost of this battle is very high for us,” he added. “It is simply terrifying.”
There are fears that a scenario similar to the one seen in the southern port city of Mariupol, where hundreds of people were trapped for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks, could play out in Sievierodonetsk’s Azot chemical plant, where Haidai said 500 civilians were sheltering, 40 of them children.
Haidai said the Ukrainian side was negotiating the evacuation of civilians from Azot with Moscow but so far had failed to reach an agreement. “We are trying to agree, with the help of [Ukrainian deputy prime minister] Irina Vereshchuk, to organise a corridor. So far it has been unsuccessful,” the official said. “Azot’s shelters are not as strong as in Mariupol’s Azovstal, so we need to take people out with security guarantees.”
Sievierodonetsk has become the focal point of Moscow’s efforts to advance in eastern Ukraine, where Russia wants to capture the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are collectively known as Donbas, after its failure to quickly seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, at the beginning of the war.
Ukrainian troops were fighting street by street to hold on to the city, with both Ukrainian and Russian forces suffering heavy losses, Roman Vlasenko, head of the Sievierodonetsk district administration, told local TV. “Our boys are holding on but the conditions are tough,” he said. Vlasenko said the city had been without communications and normal services for a month.
The militia head of the self-proclaimed pro-Russian republic in Donetsk, Eduard Basurin, warned Ukrainian troops in Sievierodonetsk they should “surrender or die”.
The UK Ministry of Defence said in its latest intelligence report that river crossing operations were likely to be among the most important determining factors in the course of the war.
The key, 90km-long central sector of Russia’s frontline in Donbas lies to the west of the Siverskyi Donets River and in order to achieve success in the current operational phase of its offensive, Russia was “either going to have to complete ambitious flanking actions or conduct assault river crossings”, the MoD said.
Last month Russia incurred heavy losses during multiple attempts to cross the river. In one attempt, Russia is believed to have lost more than 80 vehicles as a result of Ukrainian fire, according to open source estimates.
But given Russia’s military superiority in the Donbas, military observers said Moscow is likely to make further gains in the area, and Ukrainian officials have been making daily appeals to their western partners to send Kyiv heavier weapons.
“Being straightforward – to end the war we need heavy weapons parity: 1,000 howitzers caliber 155 mm; 300 MLRS; 500 tanks; 2,000 armoured vehicles; 1,000 drones … We are waiting for a decision,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Zelenskiy, wrote on Twitter.
Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said during a meeting with his American counterpart, Mark Milley, late on Monday that Russian forces had a 10-fold advantage in firepower.
Also on Monday, the Ukrainian authorities uncovered another mass grave site in a forest near Bucha containing the bodies of seven civilian men. “Seven civilians were tortured by the Russians and brutally executed with bullets in the head,” the Kyiv region police chief, Andrei Nebitov, wrote on his Facebook page.
“Multiple victims had their hands tied and their knees shot. We are working to identify the deceased,” Nebitov added.
Ukraine’s national police said earlier in the day that up to 1,200 bodies of Ukrainians, including those found in mass graves, had not yet been identified.
The discovery of the mass grave came as Amnesty International released a report accusing Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying attacks – many using banned cluster bombs – on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv had killed hundreds of civilians.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report entitled Anyone can die at any time.
Reuters contributed to this report
