SLOVIANSK, Ukraine: Russian forces struck targets across Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday (Jul 5), a day after President Vladimir Putin declared victory in the neighbouring province of Luhansk after months of gruelling attritional warfare in which both sides lost many men.
Donetsk and Luhansk together comprise the Donbas, the industrialised eastern part of Ukraine that has seen the biggest battle in Europe for generations. Russia says it wants to wrest control of the entire Donbas from Ukraine on behalf of Moscow-backed separatists in two self-proclaimed people’s republics.
After Russian forces on Sunday took control of Lysychansk, the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Luhansk, Ukrainian officials said they now expect Moscow to focus its efforts especially on the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in Donetsk.
On Tuesday, Russian forces struck a market and a residential area in Sloviansk, killing at least two people and injuring seven, local officials said.
A Reuters reporter on the scene saw yellow smoke billowing from an auto supplies shop, and flames engulfing rows of market stalls as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze.
“Russians again deliberately target areas where civilians congregate,” Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Facebook post. “This is sheer terrorism.”
Earlier, Kyrylenko had said both Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk had suffered heavy shelling overnight. “They are now also the main line of assault for the enemy,” he said. “There is no safe place without shelling in the Donetsk region.”
LONG WAR AHEAD?
The Russian defence ministry, which says it does not target residential areas, said it had used high-precision weapons to destroy command centres and artillery in Donetsk, where Ukraine still controls a number of major cities.
In comments marking an escalation of Moscow’s war rhetoric, the speaker of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, said Ukraine had become a “terrorist state” that was doing everything to ensure that Russia did not stop its invasion at the borders of the Donbas region as advertised.
Vyacheslav Volodin’s remarks suggested Moscow might be preparing once again to expand its stated war aims, after having abandoned offensives on the capital Kyiv and second largest city Kharkiv in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance early in the war.
For all the latest world News Click Here
