DNIPRO, Ukraine — Russian forces are menacing a major urban hub in southeastern Ukraine, the country’s president said, even as Ukrainian defenders wage “fierce street fighting” in an eastern city pivotal to the struggle for a larger industrial region that the Kremlin has vowed to seize.
In the fourth month of the Russian invasion, Ukraine redoubled its pleas for more heavy weaponry to parry slow and grinding advances by Moscow’s troops, which are backed by relentless artillery fire, in the contested region known as Donbas, made up of two eastern provinces.
Crucial to that campaign is control of the industrial city of Severodonetsk, one of only two major metropolises in the region that Russia has not yet been able to capture.
