KYIV, June 11 (Reuters) – Ukraine on Saturday asked the West to speed up its arms deliveries to resist Russian army shelling in the Donbass and the international community to provide it with humanitarian aid in the face of the spread of diseases like Mariupol cholra.
In Sievierodonetsk, a lock in eastern Ukraine, in the Luhansk region, which the Russian army is trying to encircle, deadly street battles oppose the two camps, which probably suffer heavy losses, said the British intelligence in its daily update on the conflict.
At the end of the day, the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Gaidai, declared that the Russian bombardment of the chemical plant of Azot, Sievierodonetsk, had caused a violent fire after the escape of several tons of oil. He did not say whether the fire at the factory, where hundreds of civilians took refuge, had been brought under control.
According to Kyiv, Russian forces have at least 10 times more artillery than Ukrainian forces as the war in Donbass, Moscow’s main strategic objective more than three and a half months after the start of its invasion operation, is now primarily an artillery battle.
“We will certainly prevail in this war that Russia has started,” however, declared Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky during a conference in Singapore by video link. “It is on the battlefields in Ukraine that the future rules of this world are decided.”
On the ground, the Ukrainian general staff said on Saturday that Russian forces had secured positions in two villages near Sievierodonetsk.
According to the governor of the Luhansk region, the Russians control most of the city, which had 100,000 inhabitants before the war.
The main road linking Bakhmout Lyssitchansk and Sievierodonetsk is the target of permanent shelling but the positions there remain unchanged, added Serhiy Gaidai.
CHOLRA MARIOUPOL
Russian forces are trying to advance north and south of Sievierodonetsk but have made only limited gains, according to Ukraine and British intelligence.
According to Kyiv, Russia has regrouped troops, supplied with ammunition and fuel, in anticipation of offensives on two towns in the Donetsk region, Sloviansk and Siversk.
Russian strikes on Saturday interrupted the power supply to the two largest cities of Donetsk controlled by Ukraine, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, wrote regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko on the Telegram application.
Speaking later on national television, he spoke of a deliberate strategy to cut off electricity to towns in Donetsk that remain in Ukrainian hands. “The enemy understands where he is striking and for what purpose,” he said.
In southern Ukraine, the mayor of Mariupol, a port city in Donbass reduced to ruins after a siege of several weeks by Russia, declared that the sanitary infrastructures were destroyed and that corpses rotted in the streets.
“There is an epidemic of dysentery and cholera,” Vadym Botchenko told Ukrainian television. “The war which took away 20,000 inhabitants (…) unfortunately with these infections, will cost the lives of thousands of additional inhabitants.”
The mayor of Mariupol called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to set up a humanitarian corridor to allow the inhabitants still there to leave the city, now controlled by Moscow.
Volodimir Zelensky had previously accused Russia of seeking to “break every city in Donbass”.
“Sievierodonetsk, Lyssychansk, Bakhmut, Sloviansk, many, many others,” he said. “All these ruins were once happy cities.”
Each side claims to inflict many losses on the opposing side.
An adviser to Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych, estimated in an interview on social networks that Russia was losing an average of five to six times more fighters than Ukraine.
Asked if this meant that the Ukrainian army had lost up to 10,000 men in the first hundred days of war, he replied: “Yes, something like that.”
“If because of the Russian blockades we are unable to export our foodstuffs, which are so badly lacking in the world markets, the world will face an acute and severe food crisis and famine – famine in many countries Asia and Africa”, also warned Volodimir Zelensky during the conference organized in Singapore. (Report Natalia Zinets and Max Hunder, with the editorial staff of Reuters, French version Jean-Stphane Brosse and Benjamin Mallet)