Ukrainian Troops Hunt Demoralized Russian Stragglers in Seized City
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces on Sunday hunted Russian stragglers in the key city of Lyman, which was taken back from Russia after its demoralized troops, according to a major Russian newspaper, fled with “empty eyes,” and despite Moscow’s baseless claim it had annexed the region surrounding the city.
Two days after President Vladimir V. Putin held a grandiose ceremony to commemorate the incorporation of four Ukrainian territories into Russia, the debacle in the city — Lyman, a strategic railway hub in the eastern region of Donbas — ratcheted up pressure on a Russian leadership already facing withering criticism at home for its handling of the war and its conscription of up to 300,000 men into military service.
Russia’s retreat from Lyman, which sits on a riverbank that has served as a natural division between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines, came after weeks of fierce fighting.
In an unusually candid article published Sunday, the prominent Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in the last few days of their occupation, Russian forces in Lyman had been plagued by desertion, poor planning and the delayed arrival of reserves.
“The risk of encirclement or shameful imprisonment became too great, and the Russian command made a decision to fall back,” a war correspondent traveling with the fleeing Russian forces wrote, adding that dispirited soldiers with “empty eyes” had barely escaped Lyman with their lives.
The retreat is a significant blow to Russian forces that could further undermine the Kremlin’s position in Donbas, a mineral-rich and fertile part of eastern Ukraine that has been central to Mr. Putin’s war aims.
Mr. Putin’s office made no public comment about the loss of Lyman, even as pro-war commentators and two of his closest allies sharply criticized the Defense Ministry for retreating from the city.
Seemingly unfazed by its military setbacks, Moscow pressed ahead with its annexation effort on Sunday, as the country’s rubber-stamp Constitutional Court formally accepted Mr. Putin’s decision to claim the four Ukrainian regions as part of Russia.
But President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine quickly sought to capitalize politically on the retreat, saying it showed that Moscow’s attempt to illegally annex a sizable part of the country was an “absolute farce” and that “now a Ukrainian flag is” in Donbas. But the Ukrainian recoveries in areas Russia now claims have come as Mr. Putin has increasingly hinted at turning to nuclear options in the conflict, alarming American officials.
On Friday, after Russian-appointed officials held discredited referendums in the four partly occupied areas of Ukraine, Mr. Putin announced that the territory, including Lyman, would be absorbed into Russia and that its people would be Russian citizens “forever.”
Mr. Putin claimed the provinces’ residents had voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation, but Ukraine and its Western allies dismissed the referendums as shams, as most of the citizens had fled the region and many of those left behind had cast ballots at gunpoint.
Despite the Russian leader’s claims and bluster at the ceremony on Friday in a grand Kremlin hall — he denounced Washington for “Satanism” — Russian troops retreated from Lyman barely a day later.
Initially, Ukrainian commanders thought they would retake Lyman quickly, with forces nearly completely encircling the city. But Russia’s military sent reinforcements. Fierce fighting ensued in dense forests and along the banks of the Siversky Donets River as Ukraine cut off the roads used to move troops and ammunition into the city.
“In Lyman and around it, there were significantly strong forces,” Col. Sergei Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukrainian troops fighting in the east, said in an interview.
Russian soldiers retreated chaotically, breaking from their units and escaping in smaller groups into the surrounding forests, Colonel Cherevaty said, and many were killed or captured. About 2,000 to 3,000 Russian soldiers were in Lyman as Ukrainian forces arrived on the outskirts of the city on Friday, he said.
As Ukrainian soldiers and police officers fanned out across Lyman to search for Russian stragglers, it was unclear on Sunday how many had fallen into Ukrainian hands.
Mr. Zelensky said the city had been fully cleared by Sunday afternoon, as Ukrainian forces conducted patrols and delivered aid to residents who had survived months of Russian occupation and weeks of combat.
Artillery strikes have damaged much of Lyman. The city lies largely in ruins, without electricity, water or regular food supplies, according to Stanislav Zagrusky, the police chief of the Kramatorsk District, which includes Lyman.
Mr. Zagrusky said in an interview that the resumption of Ukrainian police patrols late on Saturday — hours after the Ukrainian Army declared the city liberated and Russia’s military conceded that it had retreated — underlined the absurdity of the Kremlin’s claim of sovereignty over the four Ukrainian territories.
“We absolutely don’t care what they say, what decrees they issue, what announcements they make,” he said of the Kremlin authorities, deploring the conditions in which Russian troops had left residents of Lyman during the occupation: “They did absolutely nothing for the people all this time.”
“They didn’t try to restore electricity or water, and people lived without regular food supplies,” he went on, adding that many residents needed medical care.
Mr. Zagrusky said that while the Ukrainian military took prisoners after the battle, police officers had made no arrests of Russian stragglers as of midday Sunday. His officers found that Russians had hastily abandoned a police station, leaving it littered with garbage.
The police said about 5,000 people remained in the city, which had a prewar population of 20,000.
As Ukrainian forces gained full control of Lyman, commanders turned their attention to the next steps in a punishing offensive that has left Russian troops in the eastern Donbas region in an increasingly perilous position.
From Lyman, Ukraine could push farther east to try to expel Russian troops from towns and villages they had seized over the summer, though colder temperatures could slow the fighting and Russian lines are expected to be reinforced by newly drafted troops.
Military analysts also warn that Ukrainian forces, if they push too far, could become overstretched and unable to defend newly reclaimed territory from Russian counterattacks.
None of the four illegally annexed regions are fully under Russian control. Ukrainian gains in the east and south have left the Kremlin’s forces with diminishing options for taking additional territory.
In the south, Ukrainian forces are engaged in a fierce counteroffensive in the Kherson region, which Russia seized in the first weeks of the war. Unlike in the northeast, there has been little movement in either direction, though odds increasingly appear to be stacked against Russian forces, the bulk of which have been cut off from their supply lines by successful Ukrainian attacks on key bridges spanning the vast Dnipro River.
On the other side of the Dnipro, Russian forces trying to push north in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Mr. Putin also claimed to have annexed, have been held at a standstill for months by strong Ukrainian defensive lines.
For now, Russian troops fleeing Lyman appear to be moving to reinforce their lines 25 miles to the south around the city of Bakhmut. That appears to be the only area along the extensive eastern front line where Russian forces are on the offensive, led primarily by members of the Wagner Group, a private military contractor, whose fighters have been pummeling Ukrainian forces for months.
“It’s very difficult because they have been hammering for several months with artillery and are constantly attacking with tanks and infantry,” Colonel Cherevaty said. “Holding them is difficult, but they’re managing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/w...sia-lyman.html
Ukraine Presses Forward on Two Fronts as Horrors of War Linger
PISKY-RADKIVSKI, Ukraine — The Russian soldier lay in the undergrowth, slammed against a tree. Still in full combat uniform with body armor and boots, he had been missed by the crews gathering the dead.
A week after Ukrainian troops seized back the village of Pisky-Radkivski, in the Kharkiv region, in a sweeping counteroffensive that forced Russian troops into retreat across northeastern Ukraine, the horror of war was all too evident.
“I cannot breathe in my house from the smell,” said Valentina Eliseeva, 73, a bent woman in slippers who pointed out where the soldier’s corpse lay. “The smell is so bad. When will they take it away?”
The successful counteroffensive in northeastern Ukraine has reclaimed vast swaths of territory, including Lyman, a crucial railway hub about 25 miles south of Pisky-Radkivski in Donetsk — one of the four regions of Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said last week his country was annexing and treating as its own. On Monday, Russian forces were still on the retreat in the northeast while Ukrainian forces also reported progress in the south — adding to the Kremlin’s embarrassments as it faces unusually public criticism of its war effort at home.
The battle lasted just one day in Pisky-Radkivski, but the power and accuracy of the Ukrainian assault was evident. Burned-out tanks sat still in their positions, at a crossroads and in the woods at the northern edge of the village. Russian uniforms, sleeping bags and rations lay abandoned among the fir trees opposite Ms. Eliseeva’s house.
Ukrainian artillery knocked out the tanks and killed at least eight Russian soldiers here, said Anatolii, 52, a retired engineer whose house was damaged in the strikes. “It is a strategic crossroads,” he said. “They shelled all around us.”
Most of the bodies had been removed by professional crews who tour the battle zone in white vans emblazoned with a red cross and the number 200, the code the military has used since Soviet times for cargo of dead soldiers. But they had not picked up the body by the tree, which was missing its head.
On a road past several villages to the south, a forensic team was picking up Russian bodies at the scene of an ambush. A Ukrainian soldier protested, but the forensic team explained quietly that Russian bodies could be exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers. The soldier helped lift a decomposed body into a black body bag, then leaned over to retch in the grass.
Down the road, soldiers from a Ukrainian tank crew pulled up near the body of another dead Russian soldier, who lay twisted where he had fallen, his face blackened and his body swollen.
Weary and dirty, the tank crew showed little concern for the Russian bodies, but seemed tense and angry from their recent battles. They had been fighting for 51 days without a break and were still wearing their summer uniforms, said one of them, who gave his code name as Positiv.
“We liberated four villages and planted the Ukrainian flag, but other units took the credit,” he said. “So many of our soldiers died,” he added. “So many young guys, 20-year-olds. So many.”
nytimes.com
Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts
Ukrainian troops on Tuesday accelerated their military advances on two fronts, pushing Russian forces into retreat in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the east and in the Kherson region to the south.
The gains showed Kyiv continuing to recapture occupied territory on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament sought to formalize their increasingly far-fetched “annexation” of four Ukrainian regions.
“The Ukrainian armed forces commanders in the south and east are throwing problems at the Russian chain of command faster than the Russians can effectively respond,” said a Western official who briefed reporters about sensitive security information on the condition of anonymity. “And this is compounding the existing dysfunction within the Russian invasion force.”
Ukraine has been pushing to take back as much of its occupied territory as it can before Russia potentially sends hundreds of thousands of reinforcements to the battlefield, following a recent mobilization effort.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive, which had moved far more slowly in the south compared with the lightning push through the northeastern Kharkiv region in September, has suddenly picked up speed, with Russian units retreating in recent days from a large swath of territory along the west bank of the Dnieper River.
Ukrainian forces pushed ahead dozens of miles into the southern Kherson region, liberating towns and villages in scenes reminiscent of those from mid-September, when they swept into Kharkiv and were greeted by joyful residents who had spent many months under Russian occupation.
On Monday, the spokesperson for the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that “superior tank units” of Ukraine had “wedged in the depth of our defense line” near the villages of Zolota Balka and Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said late Monday that the 129th Brigade from his native city of Kryvyi Rih had liberated the settlements of Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka.
A video shared on social media by soldiers from the Ukrainian navy’s 35th Marine Infantry Brigade showed the capture of Davydiv Brid, which delivered a major blow to Russian supply lines in the Kherson area.
Regaining control of Kherson, a rich agricultural region whose capital boasts a key port where the Dnieper flows into the Black Sea, is critical for Ukraine. Its capital was the first significant city captured by Russia at the start of its invasion in late February, and its loss would be a severe setback for Russia — strategically crippling for the military and politically humiliating for Putin.
As the only position the Russians hold west of the Dnieper, Kherson is a potential strategic springboard for Russia to launch any future offensive down the Black Sea coast toward the storied port city of Odessa.
Ukrainian officials had touted an operation to liberate Kherson for months. But until now, its forces had struggled in the south, suffering heavy casualties and making few territorial advances.
The Ukrainian gains in Kherson follow the recapture over the weekend of the strategic transit hub of Lyman, in eastern Donetsk. The Ukrainians have now pushed through Lyman, apparently intent on extending their gains into Luhansk, the region where Russia has maintained its strongest grip.
The collapse of the Russian position in Lyman occurred just as Putin was claiming that the city and all of the Donetsk region, along with Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, were annexed and restored to Russia as part of its historical lands. But unlike in Kharkiv, where Moscow ordered a retreat, Russian forces had apparently been told to defend Lyman.
“All Russian forces withdrew in poor order, suffering high casualties from artillery fire as they attempted to leave,” the Western official said of Lyman, comparing it to Kharkiv. “Then, as you recall, troops received an order to cede the territory,” the official said. “But in Lyman, we think that the Russian troops retreated despite orders to defend and remain.”
“Relinquishing this area is exactly what the Kremlin did not want to happen,” the official said.
As a result, Russian control over the Luhansk region, which was mostly uncontested since June, is now also in jeopardy.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, said geolocated footage corroborates statements from Russian military figures that Ukrainian troops are continuing their advance east of Lyman, apparently gearing up for a fight over the town of Kreminna.
The new round of Russian setbacks revived debates over Kremlin strategy among pro-Russian military bloggers, who for months have provided a more detailed and less censored look into the war campaign than Moscow’s official military reports.
“I am now being reproached for driving people into depression with my news,” Alexander Kots, a military correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, wrote Tuesday on his Telegram blog, which has more than 600,000 subscribers. “Well, there will be no good news in the near future neither from the Kherson front, nor from now Luhansk.”
Videos posted by Russian independent outlet Astra show pro-Russian fighters from the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic camping out in an open field and complaining that Russian commanders abandoned them as they withdrew.
In the videos, a man in worn-out fatigues said the Russian losses in the area were huge, with only 193 survivors and a few pieces of heavy equipment left from their initial convoy. The Washington Post could not independently verify the video clips.
Another popular Russian war blogger, known as Rybar, posted maps showing how the Russian hold on the Kherson region shrank dramatically in the span of just a few hours. Losing the west bank of the Dnieper River to Ukrainian control would be “an immediate danger” for remaining Russian units in the area, Rybar wrote to his nearly 1 million followers.
As Russia was retreating on the battlefield, Zelensky signed a decree Tuesday formally refusing any negotiations with Putin — a largely symbolic move to show Kyiv’s confidence in its military position.
Meanwhile, the political theater continued in Moscow, where the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, rubber-stamped Putin’s annexation of the four Ukrainian regions.
Putin and other officials have warned that Russia would feel entitled to defend its newly seized territories by all possible means — including, potentially, the use of nuclear weapons.
The annexation legislation now passes back to the Kremlin for Putin’s final signature, which from Russia’s perspective would complete the process of seizing more than 15 percent of all Ukrainian sovereign territory.
Putin’s brazen land-grab attempt was met with overwhelming international condemnation. Even countries that traditionally maintain closer ties to Moscow, such as Turkey and Serbia, have joined Western nations in refusing to recognize the annexation.
Putin now appears to be betting on the unpopular mobilization drive that aims to call up hundreds of thousands of men to help hold ground in the annexed regions.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced Tuesday that more than 200,000 men have been sent to the Russian armed forces in the two weeks since Putin announced the mobilization on Sept. 21.
At the same time, the interior minister in neighboring Kazakhstan, Marat Akhmetzhanov, said that an equivalent number of Russians — about 200,000 — had crossed that country’s border since Sept. 21, most of them fleeing the mobilization or leaving out of fear that Putin would soon impose martial law and ban international travel. Tens of thousands more Russians have fled to other neighboring countries, including Georgia and Finland.
The botched mobilization has led to severe recriminations in Russia, with some governors expressing fury that men who are too old or otherwise unqualified are being wrongly called to duty.
Shoigu, the defense minister, tried to respond to a torrent of recent reports on Russian social media from mobilized men and their family members complaining about the lack of appropriate equipment in military units, which forced some newly enlisted soldiers to seek protective gear themselves.
“Officials have been instructed to provide the mobilized with the necessary sets of clothing and other equipment,” Shoigu said, adding that 80 training grounds across Russia are now accepting mobilized soldiers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...lyman-ukraine/