KYIV—Kyiv said on Saturday Moscow had reinforced its troops around Sievierodonetsk and attempted to cut off Ukraine’s access to the industrial city, the focus of a Russian offensive to take the eastern Donbass region.
Serhiy Gaidai, governor of Luhansk Province, said Russian forces were blowing up bridges across the Siverskyi Donets river to prevent Ukraine bringing in military reinforcements in Sievierodonetsk.
“The Russian army, as we understand, is throwing all its efforts, all its reserves in that (Sievierodonetsk) direction,” Gaidai said in a live TV broadcast on Saturday.
“Russians are blowing up bridges, so we could not bring in reinforcements to our boys in Sievierodonetsk,” he said.
For both sides, the fighting in the east in recent weeks has been one of the deadliest phases of the war, with Ukraine saying it is losing 60 to 100 soldiers every day.
Ukraine’s military said on Saturday Russia had used artillery to conduct “assault operations” in Sievierodonetsk, but Russian forces retreated and Ukrainian troops are holding positions inside the city, around 145 kilometres (90 miles) from the Russian border.
Russian soldiers also attempted to advance towards Lysychansk, across the Siverskyi Donets river from Sievierodonetsk, but were stopped, Ukraine’s military general staff said.
Reuters reached Sievierodonetsk on Thursday and was able to verify that Ukrainians still held part of the city.
In neighbouring Donetsk Province, Russian troops were just 15 km (9 miles) outside the city of Sloviansk, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Reuters on Friday.
Britain’s defence ministry said on Saturday that Russian air activity remains high over Donbass, with Russian aircraft carrying out strikes using both guided and unguided munitions.
In Ukraine’s southern Odesa region on Saturday morning, a missile hit an agricultural storage unit, wounding two people, the regional administration’s spokesman wrote on Telegram.
Ukrainian officials are counting on advanced missile systems recently pledged by the United States and Britain to swing the war in their favour, and Ukrainian troops have already begun training on them.
Moscow has said the Western weapons will pour “fuel on the fire,” but will not change the course of what it calls a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of dangerous nationalists.
