Kyiv ackowledged its worst military losses from a single attack of the Ukraine war on Monday, saying 87 people had been killed last week when Russian forces struck a barracks housing troops at a training base in the north.
The announcement that scores had been killed in a single strike demonstrated Russia's ability to inflict huge losses on Ukraine, even far from the front. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy disclosed the toll during a speech on Monday by video link to business leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Ukraine had previously said at least eight people were killed in the May 17th attack, while giving few details. The toll was more than double the number killed in a similar attack on a Ukrainian training base in Yaraviv in the west in March.
"History is at a turning point... This is really the moment when it is decided whether brute force will rule the world," Mr Zelenskiy said in his address, calling for maximum economic sanctions on Russia.
‘They used us as human shields’: A Ukrainian villager’s 10 days in Russian captivity
Russian soldier admits to Kyiv court that he shot dead elderly civilian
State response to Ukraine crisis included ‘heavy reliance’ on community sector
Zelenskiy describes the Luhansk region as ‘hell’ under Russian artillery strikes
In the latest fighting at the battlefront, Ukraine said on Monday it had held off a Russian assault on Sievierodonetsk, an eastern city that has become the main target of Moscow’s offensive since it finally seized Mariupol last week.
Russian forces tried to storm Sievierodonetsk but were unsuccessful and retreated, Mr Zelenskiy’s office said.
The city, on the Siverskiy Donets River, has been the main Russian target in recent days as Moscow tries to encircle Ukrainian forces and fully capture Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
With Moscow having captured Mariupol last week after a three-month siege but losing territory elsewhere, the war in Ukraine is entering what some Western military analysts describe as a new phase: a major Russian push to capture the eastern region known as the Donbas, before Moscow is expected to shift to defending and imposing its rule over territory it controls.
Russian president Vladimir Putin quipped on Monday that he would have a serious talk to the West about its assertions that he was to blame for all the economic chaos sown by the conflict in Ukraine and the West's crippling sanctions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has killed thousands and displaced 14 million people, while the West’s attempt to isolate Russia as punishment and Moscow’s blockade of grain shipments from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, have sent the price of oil, natural gas, grains, cooking oil and fertilisers soaring.
At a televised meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Mr Putin told Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko that Russia’s economy was doing well, despite the Western sanctions.
Mr Lukashenko said the sanctions had given both countries the impetus to focus on self-development, and that the elites of the West were deluded about the causes of their economic woes.
“On the economy, thanks are really due to them (in the West) as they have given us such a push to our own development,” Mr Lukashenko told Mr Putin, who smiled and nodded.
“What is happening over there is that they really underestimated it by reading their own media. They got inflation yet the truth is ‘Putin is to blame’, ‘Putin is to blame for everything’,” Mr Lukashenko said. Mr Putin pursed his lips and nodded. “We will have a serious talk to them,” Mr Putin said with a forced smile. Mr Lukashenko chuckled and said “Yes”.
Russian soldier charged
In Kyiv, a court handed down a life prison sentence on a Russian soldier who had pleaded guilty to killing a Ukrainian civilian at the first war crimes trial of the conflict. The Kremlin complained that it was not permitted to defend its citizen.
In Mariupol, where hundreds of Ukrainian fighters finally laid down their arms last week after a nearly three-month siege, Russian mine clearing teams were combing through the ruins of the giant Azovstal steel plant.
A huge armoured bulldozer painted with a white letter “Z”, symbol of Russia’s assault, pushed debris to the side as a small group of soldiers picked their way through the wreckage with metal detectors.
“The task is huge. The enemy planted their own landmines, we had also planted anti-personnel mines while blocking the enemy. So we’ve got some two weeks of work ahead of us,” said a Russian soldier, going by the nomme de guerre Babai. He said his crew had destroyed more than 100 explosives over two days so far.
Ukraine has been trying to secure a prisoner swap for fighters who surrendered at the steel plant last week. The leader of pro-Russian separatists in control of the area said they would be tried by a tribunal, but a Russian deputy foreign minister was quoted as saying Moscow could discuss a swap.
An aide to Mariupol’s Ukrainian mayor, operating outside the city, said remaining residents were now in danger of disease as sewers overflow amid the ruins.
Ukraine believes tens of thousands of people died in the siege of the city of more than 400,000 people.
Territorial gains
Russia has focused its “special military operation” on the east since its troops were driven out of the area around the capital Kyiv and the north at the end of March.
Since last month, Moscow has said its main effort is capturing all of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, together known as the Donbas, which Russia claims on behalf of separatists.
Despite pouring its forces into those areas and launching massive artillery bombardments, it has made only small territorial gains, meanwhile continuing to lose territory in a Ukrainian counter-attack further north around Kharkiv. But the full capture of Mariupol last week gives Russia its biggest victory for months. Its forces now control a largely unbroken swathe of the east and south, freeing up more troops to join the main Donbas fight.
In recent days it has launched a series of assaults to capture Sievierodonetsk, the easternmost part of a Ukrainian-held pocket of the Donbas and one of the last parts of Luhansk province still outside Russia’s grip.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russia was using scorched earth tactics and “wiping Sievierodonetsk from the face of the earth”.
Moscow was trying to advance from three directions, to overrun Sievierodonetsk, cut off a highway south of it and cross the river further west.
Some Western military experts say Russia may soon be running out of combat power to wage offensive operations and could have to shift in coming weeks to defending territory. The arrival of more Western weapons would strengthen Kyiv for a future counterattack.
“As their eastern offensive loses momentum, the Russians will inevitably have to transition to a defensive strategy in Ukraine. And in doing so, the Russian Army will confront a new range of difficult challenges ahead,” tweeted Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and defence analyst.
“The Ukrainian Army will be able to decide where and when it engages the Russians.” Britain’s ministry of defence said Moscow had probably endured losses in three months in Ukraine on par with its losses over nine years in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
“A combination of poor low-level tactics, limited air cover, a lack of flexibility, and a command approach which is prepared to reinforce failure and repeat mistakes has led to this high casualty rate, which continues to rise in the Donbas offensive,” it said. – Reuters