The Ukrainian army is trying to retake the strategic town of Lyman located in the Donetsk region. It now encircles the railway city.
SourceAFP
© PAVLO BAHMUT / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP
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L’Ukrainian army claimed on Saturday to have “surrounded” several thousand Russian soldiers in the town of Lyman, an important railway junction in eastern Ukraine under the control of troops from Moscow. “Russian forces are surrounded in Lyman,” a spokesman for the army in the east, Serguiï Tcherevatiï, told Ukrainian television, quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
According to him, “about 5,000 to 5,500 Russians” had been entrenched in and around Lyman in recent days. “But the last fights have (since) reduced their numbers,” he added to Ukrainian television.
Russian soldiers trapped
According to Serguiï Gaïdaï, the governor of the neighboring region of Luhansk, the Russian soldiers present “in the cauldron” of Lyman “have three options: to flee, to die together or to surrender”, he indicated on the networks. social. Sergei Tcherevatiï also indicated that troops from kyiv had taken over five villages around Lyman, accentuating the growing pressure on the Russian soldiers who are now trapped there.
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These announcements come the day after the annexation of four Ukrainian regions to Russia by President Vladimir Putin, an attachment widely condemned by kyiv and its Western allies. On Friday, a senior pro-Russian separatist official said the Russians were fighting in Lyman “at the end of their tether” in the face of a situation deemed “difficult”. For several weeks, the Ukrainian army has made significant territorial gains in the Kharkiv region, northwest of Donetsk, where Lyman is located. But the Ukrainians are also trying to make progress in the Donetsk region, where the Russians are resisting as best they can.