Ukraine is evacuating its troops from Sievierodonetsk, the besieged eastern city that is now 70 per cent controlled by Russian forces, after suffering heavy losses.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of the eastern Luhansk region, said on Wednesday Ukrainian forces had partly retreated from the provincial capital amid heavy shelling and fierce street battles.
“This is not a betrayal,” he wrote in a post on Telegram, but part of a retreat “to more advantageous, pre-prepared positions” while awaiting “western weapons and preparing for de-occupation”.
Russian forces entered the largely evacuated and bombed out Sievierodonetsk earlier this week after being held back for around two months by Ukrainian fighters.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine could lose up to 100 soldiers a day defending the country’s eastern region, just over three month’s into Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a US think-tank, called the decision to retreat “strategically sound, however painful”.
They said “Ukraine must husband its more limited resources and focus on regaining critical terrain”, such as by “continuing successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kherson”, a Russian-occupied city in the south of the country.
Haidai said an undisclosed number of Ukrainian troops had retreated westwards across the Siverskyi Donetsk river to Sievierodonetsk’s sister city, Lysychansk. For weeks they had been the last two remaining Ukrainian-held strongholds in the Luhansk region, which along with Donetsk makes up the far eastern Donbas.
News of the Sievierodonetsk retreat came hours after the US announced that it would supply Ukraine with long-range rocket systems, part of its recently approved $40bn assistance package.
Ukraine has long pleaded for such systems, arguing that they are necessary to hold ground and launch counter offensives. The newly-supplied US rockets are longer range and more powerful than the howitzers, lethal drones and handheld anti-tank and anti-air missiles western countries have supplied so far.
“Our president has said many times, had we received these weapons before the situation would be different with less occupied regions in the hands of Russia today,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, told the Financial Times.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Wednesday the US decision to send more weapons to Kyiv amounted to “pouring oil on the fire”. But he declined to say how Russia would respond should Ukraine fire US rockets into Russian territory.
A senior EU official said the US long-range missiles could be deployed against Russian warships in the Black Sea as they threaten the ports of Odesa and Mykolayiv, which are in range of sea-launched Russian missiles.
US officials said Kyiv had pledged not to use long-range rockets supplied by Washington for strikes on Russian soil.
On Wednesday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz said Berlin would supply Ukraine with IRIS-T air defence systems, which are more powerful equipment than he has previously pledged.
Speaking on Tuesday, Zelensky said: “If our steps or operations to de-occupy this or that region cost tens of thousands of our dead people, we will wait for appropriate weapons to save as many of our people as possible.”
After pulling back from its attempt to capture Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and north-eastern regions at the start of the war, Russia has in the past two months concentrated most of its forces on the Donbas and on holding occupied southern coastal regions, which together account for about 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory.
Ukrainian forces still control parts of Donetsk to the west of Sievierodonetsk, but Russian forces are closing in on key cities and Kyiv’s army last month retreated from some previously held towns such as Svitlodarsk.
Additional reporting by Valentina Pop in Brussels and John Paul Rathbone in London
