KYIV: Ukraine has claimed full control of eastern Russia’s logistics hub Lyman, its biggest battlefield win in weeks, paving the way for new advances aimed at cutting supply lines from Moscow to his battered troops on a single route.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stinging setback came after he on Friday proclaimed the annexation of four regions covering nearly a fifth of Ukraine, an area that includes Lyman. Kyiv and the West condemned the proclamation as an illegitimate farce.
Read: Defiant Putin proclaims Ukrainian annexation as military setback looms
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the capture of the town, where Ukrainian flags were hoisted above municipal buildings on Saturday, demonstrated that Ukraine is capable of dislodging Russian forces and has shown the impact Ukraine’s deployment of advanced Western weapons had on the conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that the success of the country’s soldiers was not limited to the recovery of Lyman.
Ukrainian forces have also liberated the small settlements of Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka in the Kherson region, he said.
Ukraine’s Interfax news agency reported that according to Serhiy Cherevatyi, spokesman for the Group of Ukrainian Forces in the East, Ukrainian forces have taken over Torske, a small village in the Donetsk region, about 15 km (9 miles) from east of Lyman, now liberated.
Reuters was unable to immediately verify the information.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday it was withdrawing troops from the Lyman area “in connection with the creation of an encirclement threat.”
He did not mention Lyman in his daily update on the fighting in Ukraine on Sunday, although he said Russian forces had destroyed seven artillery and missile depots in the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Donetsk.
Russian forces had captured Lyman in Ukraine in May and used it as a logistics and transport hub for their operations in the northern Donetsk region. Its recapture by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s biggest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive in the northeast Kharkiv region in September.
Control of Lyman could prove a “key factor” in helping Ukraine reclaim lost territory in the neighbouring Luhansk region, which Moscow announced it would take completely in early July after weeks of massive advances, the official said. governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Gaidai.Lyman’s operational importance was due to his command over a route across the Siverskyi Donets River, behind which Russia tried to shore up its defences, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said.
“Thanks to the success of the operation in Lyman, we are moving towards the second north-south route and this means that a second supply line will be interrupted,” said Reserve Colonel Viktor Kevlyuk of the Ukrainian think tank Center for Defense Strategies.
“And in this case, the Russian group of Luhansk and Donetsk could only be supplied by the (Russian) Rostov region,” Kevlyuk told Espresso TV.
The areas claimed by Putin as annexed just over seven months after Russia invaded its neighbour – Donetsk and Luhansk plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south – make up about 18% of Ukraine’s total area.
The Russian parliament is due to consider bills and ratification treaties on Monday to absorb the regions, said the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin.
A signing ceremony to much Kremlin fanfare on Friday with Russian leaders ensconced in the regions failed to stem a wave of criticism in Russia over the way its military operation is being handled.
Putin’s ally Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the southern region of Chechnya, on Saturday called for a change in strategy “until the declaration of martial law in the border areas and the use of nuclear weapons low performance”. Washington says it would react decisively to any use of nuclear weapons.
On Saturday, other warmongering Russian figures criticized Russian generals and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on social media for overseeing the setbacks but refrained from attacking Putin.
The United States was “very encouraged” by Ukraine’s gains, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Sunday, while NATO’s Stoltenberg said Lyman’s downfall demonstrated the effectiveness of Western weapons in the conflict.
Pope Francis on Sunday made an impassioned appeal to Putin to stop “this spiral of violence and death” in Ukraine and also called on Zelenskiy to be open to any “serious peace proposals”.
Zelenskiy said Friday that peace talks with Russia while Putin was still president would be impossible. “We are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but with another president of Russia,” he said.
