Russian troops moved closer to taking two important targets in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as Moscow and Kyiv accused each other of being unwilling to resume talks on ending three months of all-out war.
The Kremlin’s forces continued to make slow but steady progress amid fierce artillery exchanges and gun battles in Donbas, as a report by independent experts warned there was a “very serious risk of genocide” being committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials denied claims from some Russian sources that Kyiv’s troops had lost control of the whole of Lyman, an important rail junction in the Donetsk region, and were trapped and surrounded in Severodonetsk, a city in neighbouring Luhansk province.
Kyiv’s military appeared to acknowledge that much of Lyman was now under Russian control, however, and while Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai insisted that Russian troops would not be able to capture the rest of his region in the coming days, he said Ukrainian units may have to pull back from current positions to avoid encirclement.
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US and British officials confirm that Russia is gaining ground in Donbas after focusing forces there following its failure to capture Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s two main cities.
British prime minister Boris Johnson said that “at great cost to himself and to [his] military”, Russian president Vladimir Putin was “continuing to chew through ground in Donbas”.
“He’s continuing to make gradual, slow but, I’m afraid, palpable progress and therefore it is absolutely vital that we continue to support the Ukrainians militarily.”
Mr Johnson said Ukraine needed long-range multiple-launch rocket systems to drive Russian forces back and “defend themselves against this very brutal Russian artillery, and that’s where the world needs to go”.
US media report that the White House is now leaning towards sending such systems to Ukraine, having rebuffed its requests for the powerful rockets for months, apparently due to concerns that the Kremlin would regard it as an escalatory move.
According to the Kremlin, Mr Putin told Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer on Friday that Kyiv was “sabotaging talks between Russia and Ukraine” on ending a war that has killed thousands of people and driven about 14 million from their homes.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his people had no eagerness to talk Mr Putin after his all-out invasion of their country, but “there are things to discuss with the Russian leader … We have to face the realities of what we are living through.
“What do we want from this meeting... We want to reclaim the life of a sovereign country within its own territory,” he added, while saying he saw no willingness on the Kremlin’s part to end the conflict.
Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv had not “received a single positive indicator from the Russian Federation that would suggest their readiness to hold such a meeting” between Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskiy.
“From what we know, president Putin is more about waging war than negotiating, so it’s hard for me to say when this meeting can take place,” he added.
Mr Zelenskiy has accused Russia of committing genocide in Ukraine, and Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating some 14,000 possible cases of alleged war crimes by Moscow’s troops.
“What we have seen so far is that this war is genocidal in its nature, in terms of the language being used and the manner in which it is being executed,” said Azeem Ibrahim, a director of the US-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy think tank, which compiled a report on the issue with Montreal’s Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
