In yet another defeat by the Ukrainian army, Russia has given up the strategically important city of Lyman in the Donetsk region. The armed forces had been withdrawn because of the risk of encirclement, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday in Moscow. Ukrainian authorities had previously spoken of around 5,000 encircled Russian soldiers. An independent clarification of the contradictory information was initially not possible.
For weeks Lyman had been fought bitterly. After the defeat in the northern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv and their withdrawal from there, Russian troops tried to build a new front line along the Oskil and Siverskyi Donets rivers. Lyman as the nearest town across from the Sloviansk conurbation held by Kyiv – Kramatorsk was considered important in this regard. On the one hand, to be able to launch attacks in the north of the Donbass region, on the other hand as a barrier against a Ukrainian counter-offensive.
After intense fighting, the city fell on Saturday. Ukrainian units hoisted the blue and yellow national flag in Lyman. The Ukrainians had previously taken the city in the pliers. The Russians’ only supply and retreat link to the east via Zarichne and Torske came under fire from the Ukrainian artillery. It is unclear how many Russian soldiers died or were taken prisoner.
5000 Russian soldiers surrounded
According to their own statements, the Ukrainian troops had at times surrounded around 5,000 Russian soldiers. That was the status on Saturday morning, said the Ukrainian head of administration for Luhansk, Serhiy Hajdaj. “The occupiers asked their leadership to come out if possible, and they were rebuffed,” he said. “They now have three courses of action: either they can try to break out or they surrender. Or they all die together. There are about 5,000 of them, there is no exact number.”
Hajdaj said there had never been such a number of encircled Russians in the war. After the Russian defeat in Kharkiv, Lyman was considered so important that the Russian leadership wanted to hold the city as long as possible, at least until the declaration of the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions of Cherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the annexation at a ceremony in the Kremlin on Friday. No state recognizes this breach of international law. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had announced that all occupied territories would be liberated. To do this, he relies on heavy weapons from the West and on military advisors from the NATO countries.
For Moscow, the withdrawal from Lyman is yet another major setback in the invasion that has been going on for more than seven months. Russian troops took Lyman, where 20,000 people lived before the outbreak of war, in May. Since then, Russia has developed the city into a military logistics and transport center. Now that the city is back in Kiev’s hands, the way is open for Ukrainian troops deep into the rest of Donetsk, which together with Luhansk forms the Donbass. Parts of the areas have been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
In a first reaction to the defeat, the ruler of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, called for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine to be examined. Kadyrov criticized the Russian commanders for the withdrawal from Lyman on Telegram and went on to write: “In my personal opinion, more drastic measures should be taken, up to the imposition of martial law in the border regions and the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.”