Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai said on Saturday that Russian forces had launched 20 artillery, mortar and rocket attacks in the province overnight and the Russians were pushing towards the border with neighboring Donetsk. “We are trying to contain the armed formations of the Russians along the entire front line,” Haidai wrote on Telegram, describing the attacks in terms of “true hell.” Last week, Russia captured the last major Ukrainian resistance stronghold in Luhansk, the town of Lysychansk, and analysts had predicted that Moscow’s troops would likely take an “operational pause” to rearm and regroup. “So far no operational pause has been announced by the enemy. It is still attacking and bombing our territories with the same intensity as before,” Haidai said. In a later post, the governor claimed that the bombing of Luhansk was only suspended because Ukrainian forces had destroyed Russian ammunition depots and barracks used by Russian troops. Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk appealed to residents of Russian-controlled areas in the south of the country to leave so that occupation forces cannot use them as human shields during an impending Ukrainian counter-offensive. “You have to find a way to get out, because the armed forces are coming to take us over,” he said. “It’s going to be a huge battle. I don’t want to scare anyone. Everyone understands all this anyway.” Speaking at a press conference late Friday, Vereshchuk said an evacuation effort was already underway for parts of Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. He declined to give details, citing security reasons. It was not clear how civilians were expected to safely leave Russian-held areas while rocket attacks and shelling continued in the surrounding areas, or whether they would be allowed to leave by occupation forces or even if they would heed the call. of the Ukrainian government I evacuate.
The civilian death toll continues to rise
Five people were killed and eight others were wounded in Russian shelling on Friday in Shiversk and Semikhria in the Donetsk region, regional governor Pavlo Kirilenko wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday morning. In the city of Sloviansk, widely seen as the next target of Russia’s offensive in the east, rescuers said they pulled a 40-year-old man from the rubble of a building destroyed by shelling on Saturday morning. Kyrylenko had said that many people remained buried under the debris. Russian rockets also killed two people and wounded three others on Saturday morning in the southern city of Kryvyi Rih, regional authorities said. “They deliberately targeted residential areas,” Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, told Telegram. Kryvyi Rih Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul said in a Facebook post that cluster munitions were used and urged residents not to approach unknown objects on the streets. In northeastern Ukraine, a Russian rocket attack that hit the center of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, injured six people, including a 12-year-old girl, regional prosecutors said. “According to preliminary data, an Iskander ballistic missile was likely used in the strike,” the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement on Saturday. “One of the rockets hit a two-story building, which led to its destruction. Neighboring houses were damaged.” Kharkiv has been targeted throughout the war, including several times in the past week. Mykolayiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said in a Telegram post that six Russian missiles were fired at his city in southern Ukraine, near the Black Sea, but caused no casualties. Russian defense officials claimed on Saturday that their forces destroyed a hangar housing US howitzers in Ukraine, near the city of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk province. There was no immediate response from Ukraine.
