A decisive step in the war in Ukraine?
Russia claimed on Sunday that it had conquered Lysychansk and controlled the entire Lugansk region, a potentially key advance in the battle for Donbass in eastern Ukraine.
Moscow also accused kyiv of having fired “three missiles” at a Russian city where local authorities reported four dead.
Russian Defense Minister "Sergei Shoigu informed" President Vladimir Putin "of the liberation of the People's Republic of Lugansk", after the capture of the city of Lysychansk, at the heart of intense fighting, according to an official statement quoted by Russian news agencies.
Russian forces and their separatist allies have taken "complete control of Lysytchansk and other nearby towns, the most notable of which are Belogorovka, Novodrujesk, Maloriazantsevo and Belaya Gora," the statement added.
This information could not be independently verified.
Read alsoUkraine: why Russia is targeting Lyssychansk, the last city standing in the Luhansk region
The capture of Lysytchansk, if confirmed by kyiv, would allow Moscow to progress in its plan to conquer all of Donbass, an industrial region in eastern Ukraine largely Russian-speaking and partly controlled by separatists. since 2014, and to advance towards the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, further west, where the inhabitants already live to the daily rhythm of warning sirens and bombardments.
In Kremlin phraseology, the ongoing offensive in eastern Ukraine is aimed at liberating territories considered Russian.
On Sunday morning, the governor of the Lugansk region, Serguiy Gaidar, had hinted that the Ukrainian forces were rapidly losing ground to the attackers in Lysytchansk, a city which had 100,000 inhabitants before the start of the war.
"The Russians are setting up shop in a district of Lysytchansk, the city is on fire," he said.
Several deaths in Belgorod
The Russian army also claimed to have shot down three Ukrainian missiles at dawn on Sunday, launched against the town of Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, where a local official had previously announced the death of at least three people after attacks. explosions.
“Russian air defenses shot down the three Tochka-U cluster missiles launched by Ukrainian nationalists against Belgorod.
After the destruction of the Ukrainian missiles, the debris of one of them fell on a house,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Moscow has repeatedly accused kyiv of hitting Russian soil, particularly in the Belgorod region.
At the beginning of April, Mr. Gladkov had accused Ukraine of carrying out an attack against a fuel depot in Belgorod with two helicopters.
The warning from Belarus
In Kharkiv, the second city of Ukraine, in the North-East, the inhabitants were awakened again at 4 a.m. "by Russian rocket attacks", according to the governor of the region, Oleg Sinegoubov, who also reported Russian "shooting" in the morning on several districts in his area.
On the southern front, the Ukrainian regional operational command indicated in the morning that in the past 24 hours the Russian army had carried out "nine airstrikes with K-52 combat helicopters and 2 bombardments on the island of Serpents,” taken over by Kyiv forces in the northwest Black Sea on Wednesday.
From the same source, the building of a rest base located on the coast was damaged by a Russian missile which caused no casualties.
For its part, the Ukrainian army says it has carried out five strikes with planes and helicopters on two ammunition warehouses and five points of concentration of Russian forces.
On the diplomatic level, Belarus, a neighbor of Ukraine and an ally of Moscow, seemed to send a warning to kyiv and its Western backers on Saturday evening, fueling speculation about Minsk's growing involvement in the conflict.
