Russia has stepped up its air force to support artillery and ground forces fighting to expand territory in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, including the city of Sievierodonetsk, a British intelligence agency report said on Saturday.
Ukrainian forces on Friday moved heavy cannons and howitzers to the front lines in Sievierodonetsk, pouring men and armor into battle in an apparent refusal to withdraw from a city that Russia has been shelling missiles for weeks. A statement from the Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday said Ukrainian troops were withdrawing from the city, a position Ukrainian officials have denied. The regional Ukrainian military administrator had said overnight that Ukrainian troops had managed to cut Russian forces by 20 percent.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s troops have made the heavily industrialized Donbas region, which borders Russia, the center of his military campaign after Russian forces failed to take the capital Kiev early in the conflict. .
That was partly due to Moscow’s inability to destroy Ukraine’s air defense systems.
In the second phase of the war, however, Russia has deployed air forces to support guided and unguided missile strikes, in what the British intelligence report on Sunday called its “creeping advance”.
“The combined use of air and artillery strikes has been a key factor in Russia’s recent tactical successes in the region,” the report said. It noted that the increased use of unguided munitions has “almost certainly” resulted in civilian casualties.
Sievierodonetsk is located in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. The head of Ukraine’s military administration there, Serhiy Haidai, said on Saturday that a mother and child were killed in the fighting over the past day, the latest in a battle from which the vast majority of the city’s population has fled. Mr Haidai did not give details of how they were murdered.
Although the Donbas, which the territory has held since 2014, is Russia’s strategic priority, the front line stretches hundreds of kilometers from the Russian border north of the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, to the city of Mykolaiv. the Black Sea. That distance and the vastness of the fighting are putting pressure on the Ukrainian government, whose troops are at risk of being stretched.
Russian troops have fired “intense fire” on Ukrainian positions in villages north of the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s defense ministry said on Saturday.
Further south, in Donetsk province — which forms the Donbas with Luhansk — Russian forces shelled three villages near the city of Sloviansk and attempted an attack on another, the defense ministry said.
And a cruise missile fired from a plane by Russian forces hit the Odessa region on the Black Sea coast early Saturday morning, Odessa city officials said on Telegram. The missile hit a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, officials said.