Kyiv says Donbas village in Russian hands

KYIV • Russian forces pushed deeper into the Donbas region yesterday, with Ukraine announcing they had captured the front-line village of Toshkivka near the twin cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, the site of fierce weeks-long fighting.

"According to our information, Toshkivka is controlled entirely by the Russians," Mr Roman Vlasenko, the head of the Sievierodonetsk district, told Ukrainian television yesterday, adding that the battle for Donbas is "now in full swing".

Toshkivka, with a pre-war population of about 5,000 people, is about 25km south of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian troops have been battling for weeks against Kyiv's army.

"The entirety of the Luhansk region is now the epicentre of fighting between Ukraine and the Russian army," he said.

Earlier yesterday, Luhansk's regional governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russia was heavily shelling the industrial city of Lysychansk.

"Fighting in the Sievierodonetsk industrial zone and catastrophic destruction in Lysychansk," Mr Gaidai said in a statement on social media, adding that Lysychansk had suffered from heavy Russian strikes the previous day.

Mr Gaidai also said that one person had been confirmed killed in the "heavy shelling" that had persisted all day on Monday and destroyed 10 residential blocks and a police station.

The battle for the east has become a brutal war of attrition in recent weeks, with Russia concentrating its overwhelming firepower on a Ukrainian-held pocket of the Donbas region that Moscow claims on behalf of its separatist proxies.

Russia has made slow progress there since April, with the relentless fighting costing both sides thousands of troops. It is also one of the bloodiest land battles in Europe for generations.

The fighting has spanned the Siverskyi Donets River that curls through the region, with Russian forces mainly on the east bank and Ukrainian forces mainly on the west, though Ukrainians are still holding out in the east bank city of Sievierodonetsk.

Although fighting has favoured Russia in recent weeks because of its huge firepower advantage in artillery, some Western military analysts say the Russian forces' failure to make a major breakthrough so far means time is now on the Ukrainians' side. Moscow is running out of fresh troops, while Ukraine is receiving newer and better equipment from the West, tweeted retired US Lieutenant-General Mark Hertling, a former commander of US ground forces in Europe. "It's a heavyweight boxing match," he wrote.

"In two months of fighting, there has not yet been a knockout blow.

"It will come, as (Russian) forces become more depleted."

Ukraine said yesterday that it had at last deployed advanced German artillery systems, in the latest delivery of the long-range, precision weapons that Kyiv has been calling for.

"Panzerhaubitze 2000 are finally part of 155mm howitzer arsenal of the Ukrainian artillery," Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov wrote on social media, thanking his German counterpart Christine Lambrecht. Germany said last month it would send seven self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine.

The United States, France and other allies of Ukraine have vowed to send further supplies of heavy weapons to Kyiv.

Deliveries from Washington are due this month.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS