“Frequencyof the shelling of Lyssytchansk, a city under Russian artillery fire in eastern Ukraine, is “huge“Said Wednesday, June 29 in the evening the governor of the Lugansk region, Serguiï Gaïdaï.
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“We are witnessing a peak of intensity in the fighting“, continued the official on Ukrainian television, specifying that”about 15,000 civilians“were still in this city of nearly 100,000 inhabitants before the war, “but that their evacuation was too dangerous at this stage“. “The city is constantly bombarded with large caliber weapons“, declared Serguiï Gaïdaï in his daily update, indicating that “fighting continued (especially) on the outskirts of the city“. Russians “brought a large number of vehicles and soldiers“, he detailed, before adding: “The bombardments and enemy attacks do not cease“.
Lysytchansk is the target of Russian forces after their total occupation of Severodonetsk, its neighboring city, after several weeks of fighting which ravaged the two cities and which also caused the death of dozens of civilians. It is the last major city that remains to be conquered for the Russians in the region of Lugansk, one of the two provinces of the industrial basin of the Donbass, which Moscow intends to fully control.
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Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, the other region of Donbass, for his part indicated that a civilian had been killed on Wednesday and eight other people injured. “The front line is constantly bombarded” by “rockets” Russians, he regretted, stressing however that the evacuations of civilians continued for the moment, a task “necessary (but) extremely complicated“, he said on Telegram.