Russians storm Sievierodonetsk, tell Ukrainians to surrender or die

KYIV • Russian troops have swarmed into Sievierodonetsk as heavy artillery fire pounds Ukrainian defenders mounting a desperate rearguard action in the fiercest fighting of a wider battle for control over Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

Pro-Moscow separatists claimed the last bridge out of Sievierodonetsk had been destroyed and Ukrainian defenders there must now surrender or die. Ukraine said there was still another way out although it was severely damaged.

Hundreds of civilians in Sievierodonetsk were sheltering in the city's Azot chemical plant, creating a scenario similar to the fall of the southern port city of Mariupol where hundreds of people were trapped for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks.

Regional governor Serhiy Gaidai said fighting was raging and Ukrainian forces were defending building by building. "The battles are so fierce that fighting for not just a street but for a single high-rise building can last for days," he said on social media yesterday.

He also said Russian forces now controlled about 70 per cent of Sievierodonetsk, and were destroying it "quarter by quarter" in one of the bloodiest assaults since they launched their invasion on Feb 24. "Russians continue to storm the city, having a significant advantage in artillery they have somewhat pushed back the Ukrainian soldiers," said Mr Gaidai.

He added that one crossing was destroyed on Sunday, but there was still another "half destroyed" bridge remaining, though it could not be used for heavy vehicles.

"If, after new shelling, the bridge collapses, the city will truly be cut off. There will be no way of leaving Sievierodonetsk in a vehicle," Mr Gaidai said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address on Sunday that Russia was trying to pour military reserves into the Donbas and that severe fighting was ongoing "literally for every metre".

"The key tactical goal of the occupiers has not changed: they are pressing in Sievierodonetsk, severe fighting is ongoing there - literally for every metre," Mr Zelensky said.

He said attacks that resulted in child casualties had created a lasting image of Russia for the rest of the world.

"These very facts will underscore the way in which Russia is seen by the world," he said. "Not Peter the Great, not Lev Tolstoy, but children injured and killed in Russian attacks," he said, in an apparent reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin's remarks last week comparing Moscow's military campaign to Russian emperor Peter the Great's 18th-century conquest of lands held by Sweden.

Russian shelling had hit the Azot chemical plant area three times, said Mr Gaidai.

"About 500 civilians remain on the grounds of the Azot plant in Sievierodonetsk, 40 of them children. Sometimes the military manages to evacuate someone," the regional governor added.

Mr Gaidai said Lysychansk was also being shelled by Russian forces, and a six-year-old child there had been killed.

In a separate incident, at least three people including a child were killed and four injured yesterday by Ukrainian artillery at a market in the Russian-backed separatist Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the province's news agency said.

In Pokrovsk, south-west of Sievierodonetsk, women, children and the elderly, some in wheelchairs, boarded the only train evacuating people last Saturday, at the start of a long journey from the conflict zone to safety in Lviv near the border with Poland.

"We held on until the last moment, we didn't want to leave, but life has forced us to survive," Lyuba, a woman from Lysychansk, told Reuters Television as she waited for the train to depart.

"We are leaving, we don't know where, to whom, but we are leaving."

REUTERS