Ukraine pushes to recapture city in hotly contested province of Luhansk

KYIV - Ukrainian forces are edging closer to Kreminna, a fiercely defended city in the east of the country, officials say, in a further sign that the northern part of the Luhansk region remains one of the most hotly contested parts of the battlefield. The region is currently almost entirely occupied by Russia.

“The situation there is difficult, acute,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said of Kreminna and other areas in Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in his nightly address on late Monday. “The occupiers are using all the resources available to them – and these are significant resources – to squeeze out at least some advance.”

On Tuesday, the regional governor of Luhansk, Mr Serhiy Haidai, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app: “The Russians understand that if they lose Kreminna, their entire line of defence will ‘fall.’”

A day earlier, Mr Haidai said that, in response to military pressure, part of the Russian command in the city had withdrawn to the town of Rubizhne, a few miles to the southeast, although it was not possible to independently verify the claim.

Ukraine’s campaign to recapture Kreminna began in the fall, around the time that its forces reclaimed the city of Lyman in Donetsk, at the end of a sweep through the country’s northeastern region of Kharkiv that drove Russian forces back toward their country’s border.

Since then, the sides have fought a series of battles and artillery duels over highways and small settlements around Kreminna and farther northwest, in the city of Svatove. Russian forces took over both places early in their 10-month invasion of Ukraine.

Recapturing the two cities, and a third one, Starobilsk, could enable Ukrainian forces to continue their advance toward the Russian border and take back more territory seized by Moscow. It would also give Ukraine control of a triangle of roads that provide access to two larger cities farther south, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, that fell to Russia during the summer.

Regional officials have said that the campaign is focused on larger cities, although Mr Zelensky has repeatedly said that Ukraine wants to retake all of the territory Russia has seized since 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula.

There was no independent confirmation of the battlefield developments, but Mr Vitaly Kiselyov, a senior official in the self-proclaimed Russian-backed separatist republic in Luhansk, said on Russian state television on Monday that the situation around Kreminna and Svatove remained “very tense”. Luhansk is one of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed in September.

Fighting continued in parts of those regions on Tuesday. In the southern region of Kherson, a Russian artillery strike damaged a critical infrastructure facility, a kindergarten and an emergency medical aid station, although no casualties were reported, the regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych wrote on Telegram.

In recent weeks, Russian forces have built a series of defensive barriers near Kreminna and other parts of Ukraine’s jagged front line. They have also severed the pontoon bridges over the Seversky Donets River that runs through northern Luhansk, the province’s military administration said on Telegram on Monday.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that after losing the city of Kherson and suffering other territorial setbacks, Russia was rallying its forces in northern Luhansk for an offensive that would aim to extend its control in the region and then potentially push into Kharkiv province.

To that end, the institute said, Russia is prioritising mobilising troops to defend Kreminna and Svatove over operations in other parts of the wider Donbas region. The institute cited Ukrainian military reports of increased Russian movements of troops, military equipment and ammunition in the area.

It said, however, that Russian success in the short term appeared unlikely given the difficult terrain and the “very limited” offensive capabilities of Moscow’s forces. NYTIMES