“The situation is extremely difficult” in the Donbas region. The fighting is currently concentrated in Severodonetsk because (…) the Russian army has thrown all its weight” in this battle, said the governor of the Luhansk region, Sergey Gaidai.
The “Operations are underway in the industrial zone. Street fights continue”, said Saturday, June 4 in the morning the press service of the Ukrainian presidency. At the end of the afternoon, Moscow affirmed that Ukrainian units were withdrawing from the city.
Avoid another Mariupol
Severodonetsk, which had nearly 100,000 inhabitants before the war, is a key agglomeration for taking control of eastern Ukraine. “At least six residential towers were damaged in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk” et “There were four dead and one injured” in Russian attacks in the eastern region of Lugansk, according to the presidency. On Friday June 3, the governor declared that Russian troops had no “not fully taken control” of Severodonetsk and were even forced to retreat.
Like the Ukrainian president, he had called for heavy weapons to avoid what happened in Mariupol. This strategic port on the Sea of Azov (southeast) was devastated by bombing before being taken by the Russians on May 20, despite a long resistance.
After 100 days of war, Russia claimed on Friday that it had fulfilled some of the objectives of “special military operation” which she launched on February 24. “Victory will be ours”retorted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a video where he appears in front of the presidential administration building in kyiv with several of his collaborators.
“Foreign Mercenaries”
On the other fronts too, the fighting is raging. In the Kherson region (south), “residents left the village of Trudolyubivka” and Russian forces “continue to bombard the occupied territories and the positions of the Ukrainian army”, affirmed the Ukrainian presidency, warning of a humanitarian crisis in the areas under Russian control. Also in the south, kyiv reported a Russian cruise missile hitting an agricultural business in the major port of Odessa, killing two people.
For his part, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, gave an update on Saturday on the latest operations. Moscow thus claims to have destroyed a “deployment point for foreign mercenaries” near Dachnoe, in the Odessa region, and two Ukrainian command centers and six ammunition depots in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The Russian army also claims to have hit a training center for Ukrainian gunners near Stetskovka, in the Sumy region, where “foreign instructors trained Ukrainian soldiers in the use of the M777 howitzer”. According to Moscow, Russian aircraft and artillery have hit numerous concentrations of Ukrainian troops and equipment in the past 24 hours.
The Donetsk separatist rescue services said that 2 civilians had been killed by Ukrainian fire on the separatist areas and 8 others injured in the past 24 hours. Four foreign volunteer soldiers, including a Frenchman, were killed fighting the Russian invasion in Ukraine, the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine, the official organization of foreign volunteer fighters, also announced on Saturday.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has tripled the portion of Ukrainian territory it controls: with the Crimean peninsula and the occupied territories of Donbass and southern Ukraine, Moscow now controls nearly 125,000 km2, according to President Zelensky.
On Saturday, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba blasted French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls not to “humiliate” Russia judging that this position could not “only humiliate France”.