BRUSSELS — Russian forces pushed into the destroyed Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk on Tuesday as their slow, brutal offensive in eastern Ukraine moved from indiscriminate shelling to street fighting, with thousands of civilians still trapped among the ruins.
As Moscow advanced despite heavy losses, Ukraine’s allies looked for new ways to increase the price Russia pays for aggression, while alleviating the pain it causes elsewhere. A day after the European Union agreed to ban most Russian oil imports, the bloc’s focus shifted to aiding Ukraine and helping to resume food exports essential to feeding the world.
Closing out a two-day summit in Brussels, EU leaders agreed to allocate $9.7 billion in aid to Ukraine this year, albeit with demands to fight the corruption that plagues the country. And Ursula von der Leyen, chair of the EU’s executive committee, said the developing global food crisis is “only Russia’s fault”, which has taken or blocked all Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
“The only reason we are struggling with this is because of this brutal, unjustified war against Ukraine,” she said.
Details of the oil embargo have yet to be worked out, but EU officials said it would cut Russian oil imports by 90 percent by the end of the year – a major blow to a key source of revenue for Vladimir V’s government. Putin and her ability to pay for high-tech weapons.
The deal reached on Monday allows for continued imports through pipelines, exempting Hungary, which is very heavily dependent on Russian energy, after Hungarian leader Viktor Orban said a full embargo would be “a nuclear bomb placed on the Hungarian economy is being dropped”. Mr Orban, who has been kinder to Mr Putin than any other EU leader, had held up the deal for weeks, raising the alarm about the ability of the bloc, which operates by consensus, to step up its actions against Russia.
Some EU member states are calling for the confiscation of Russian assets abroad rather than just freezing, but the Biden administration has so far resisted that move.
In Ukraine, the Russian army has attempted to cut off the easternmost zone still controlled by Ukrainian forces, and in particular the eastern tip, Sievierodonetsk, which shelled the city with artillery for weeks before attempting to take it. Russian forces fought their way to the outskirts of the city on Monday and moved “gradually toward the center” on Tuesday, said Serhiy Haidai, the head of Ukraine’s regional military administration.
But according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a relief agency, about 12,000 residents, out of a pre-war population of about 100,000, remain in the devastated city without adequate food, water, medicine or shelter from continued bombing. Many of them are old or sick people who were unable or unwilling to join the millions who fled west from eastern Ukraine.
“It breaks my heart,” said Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former United Nations humanitarian coordinator. “It really is a war against the elderly.”
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are still in towns close to the front lines, such as Lysychansk and Bakhmut, and others such as Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which are further west but still in the path of Russian offensives, and they have all seen civilians and civilians infrastructure were bombed. An unknown number still remain in the territory occupied by Russia and subject to Moscow’s increasingly strict rule of the eastern Donbas region, the Kharkiv region to its north and the coastal areas to the southwest.
Early in the war, some Russian offensives failed because they were spread too thin. Around Sievierodonetsk and other parts of Donbas, “Russia has achieved greater local success than before in the campaign by pooling troops and fires in a relatively small area,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. his latest intelligence assessment†
Western military analysts say the Russians were likely out to encircle a large pocket, trapping Ukrainian troops as they did defending the southern city of Mariupol. They have reduced the size of the bag, but have so far failed to cut it.
Heavy losses have reduced Russia’s combat strength by about 20 percent, a Pentagon official said Tuesday. Despite an uproar from the leadership, US officials say the Russian military’s continued mistakes and plodding pace are exacerbating its own course.
Since they invaded on February 24, Kremlin forces have been stretched by large casualties and loss of equipment, and by fierce and cunning Ukrainian resistance, surprising analysts expecting a quick Russian victory.
Now the Ukrainians are launching a counter-offensive against the captured southern city of Kherson, partly in hopes of forcing Russia to divert troops from Donbas.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price quoted statements from several Russian officials indicating that the Kremlin plans to annex the captured territory.
“We remain concerned about the steps Russia is taking to institutionalize control over Ukrainian sovereign territory, especially in the Kherson region,” he said at a news conference. He added: “Multiple reports indicate that Russian forces forcibly removed legitimate Ukrainian government officials and installed illegitimate pro-Russian proxies.”
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
To the ground. Fighting raged in Sievierodonetsk, the last city in the Luhansk region to remain outside Russian control since the war effort shifted to the east of the country. Although most of the city’s civilian population has fled in recent weeks, 12,000 people, many of them elderly, are said to be trapped there in appalling conditions.
On Tuesday, a Ukrainian court concluded the second war crimes trial of imprisoned Russian soldiers, found two of them guilty of shelling civilian areas and sentenced them to 11 and a half years in prison. A third trial — the first involving charges of a sex crime — is expected to begin shortly.
The soldiers sentenced on Tuesday were charged with shelling in Derhachi, a town near Kharkiv, in the northeast — an area where towns continue to be bombed by Russian forces, although the Ukrainians have pushed them back several miles. In Derhachi, houses are regularly destroyed and hundreds of people still live in underground shelters.
Ukraine’s Supreme Prosecutor Irina Venediktova wrote on Facebook that a Russian soldier “will be tried for the murder of a civilian and the sexual abuse of his wife”.
Ukraine is normally one of the world’s largest exporters of staple foods like corn, wheat and sunflower oil, but production has fallen sharply as the war disrupted sowing, harvesting, storage and, most grueling of all, transportation. Even before the war, global food reserves were low and supply chains disrupted by the pandemic, and the United Nations has predicted that the loss of Ukrainian grain will lead to famine.
Ukraine says the Russian blockade has prevented 22 million tons of grain from leaving Ukraine, and that there is limited capacity to shift that to exports by trains and trucks. In addition, Ukrainian and international officials are accusing that Russian troops attacked grain silos and railways used to transport food, stole Ukrainian grain warehouses and strewn farms with explosives, both accidentally and intentionally.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday that his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Russian military officials would visit Turkey to explore a deal to allow grain ships to leave Ukrainian ports.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels and Richard Perez-Penac From New York. Reporting contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland; Valerie Hopkins from Kiev, Ukraine; Monika Pronczuk from Brussels; Dan Bilefsky from Montreal; Victoria Kim from Seoul; Safak Timur from Istanbul; and Farnaz Fassihi From New York.
