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Ukraine Forces Retake Lyman, a Strategic City, as Russians Retreat


RIVNE, Ukraine – Russian forces withdrew from the strategic city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, a modest setback for President Vladimir V. Putin just a day after he declared the area illegal. The surrounding area is part of Russia.

Ukrainian attack on Lyman, a railway hub leading into the mineral-rich Donbas region, underscoring his determination to attack territory Putin now claims – raising stakes in a war in which nuclear-armed Russia claims to use “every means available” to defend land it considers its own.

Russia’s withdrawal quickly sparked fierce criticism among Putin’s powerful allies, who blamed Russia’s military leaders for recent losses, and called they are incompetent. It was a striking display of internal dissent after Putin displayed force in Moscow on Friday, providing a threatening speech in which he announced the annexation of Ukrainian territories, and viewed the war as an existential war between Russia and Western elites.

The merger was widely condemned by the United States and its allies as illegal. The Biden administration quickly announced the new sanctions as a punishment.

Lyman lies on the banks of the meandering Siversky Donets River, which has served as a natural divider between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines since Russian forces captured the city in May. Its recapture gives Ukrainian forces a strategic foothold to push further into the Donbas region, which has long been the focus of Putin’s goals.

Lyman’s arrest also puts more pressure on the Kremlin, which is facing defeat at home obligations of hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine.

The battle for Lyman went on for weeks, but autumn came unexpectedly because the Russians feared they would be surrounded and flee. The Ukrainians sent paratroopers and declared their victory to the world with a video of two grinning soldiers pulling the green and yellow flags of their country, then pasting it onto a sign marking the city limits.

The army “will always have the decisive vote in referendums today and in the future”, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry wrote in a tweetin a reference only to Russia’s fake vote on annexation to Ukrainian territory.

A few hours later, The Russian Defense Ministry announced the withdrawal of troops from the city.

“In connection with the creation of the threat of encirclement, allied troops have been withdrawn from the city to a ‘more favorable’ location,” the Russian ministry said in a statement posted on the messaging app Telegram.

For Russia, the defeat comes less than 24 hours after Putin’s speech on Friday – his most agonizing in the war – in which he criticized the United States as “Satanism” and the West as “enemies,” “deceive and hypocrisy through and through.”

The West, he said, has “no moral right” to condemn the annexation of parts of Ukraine, which, with its own brutal colonial history, divides the world “into its vassals – the so-called states civilized – and all the others”.

Residents of four regions of Ukraine – which are still partly controlled by Ukrainian forces – will become Russian citizens “forever”, Mr. Putin said, adding that Russia would protect them. “with all the forces and means at our disposal.”

And he once again raised the specter of the use of nuclear weapons, noting puzzlingly that the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945 had “set a precedent”.

Ukrainian officials have always said they will disregard Russia’s territorial claims and strike in the face of resistance in eastern Ukraine and around the southern port city of Kherson.

The top Pentagon official on Saturday hailed the Ukrainian military’s breakthrough in Lyman as a major success.

“It makes complete sense,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. “We are very encouraged by what we are seeing right now. Lyman sat on the Russian supply routes, and they used those routes to push men and matter south and west.”

Anger at Putin’s retreat from powerful allies has added to the chorus of pro-war Russian bloggers criticizing the government’s military leadership.

Ramzan Kadyrov, powerful leader of the republic of Chechnya, southern Russia, Written on the messaging app Telegram that Russia’s top military brass had “covered up” an “incompetent” general who should now “go to the front to wash away his shame”. Kadyrov said he told General Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian General Staff, that forces on the Lyman front had been left without sufficient communications and ammunition supplies.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a business magnate close to Putin who leads the Wagner Group – a mercenary army that fought for Russia during the war – grant a statement an hour later agreed with Mr. Kadyrov.

“Send all this garbage barefoot with a machine gun straight ahead,” Prigozhin said, in an apparent reference to Russia’s military leaders.

These influential figures’ public criticism of Russia’s war effort suggests that Putin will now face more pressure from his own internal hawks to escalate. war.

However, even as Russian forces are losing the battle on the ground, they still launch a barrage of missile, drone and missile attacks from the air.

The deadliest attack occurred on Friday in Zaporizhzhia, one of four regions of Ukraine claimed by the Kremlin in a protest annexation. The attack scattered shrapnel into a row of about 200 civilian cars and vans laden with luggage and passengers, waiting at a checkpoint and bus stop to enter Russian-occupied territory. to visit relatives or deliver medicine and other humanitarian supplies across the front lines.

According to Ivan Fedorov, mayor of the occupied town of Melitopol, 30 people were killed, including 2 children, and 118 others were injured. That would make it one of the deadliest single attacks against civilians in recent weeks.

Witnesses described a grisly scene, with the dead and wounded scattered across the street.

“People were lying on the ground, either near their cars or a little further, depending on how far they traveled, and they were dead,” said Natalia, a woman getting out of a car waiting to be towed. as long as the first said. explosion sounded.

“I lay on the ground waiting for it to come out,” said Natalia, who asked not to release her last name out of concern for her safety. The second explosion shattered the window of her car, she said, and about a dozen more explosions followed.

Two of her passengers, a man and a woman, died, and two others were injured, she said.

Maya Muravyova, a volunteer with Help People, an NGO that supports internally displaced people, said several trucks carrying humanitarian aid were lined up.

“It could be called an act of terrorism,” she said. “It was just a peaceful residential area, with absolutely no military bases or soldiers. That’s where the humanitarian relief columns and people depart to cross the front lines.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine condemn the strike So does Bridget Brink, the US ambassador to Ukraine.

Also on Friday, Iranian-made kamikaze missiles and drones recently purchased by the Russian military hit residential areas in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, killing at least three people and killing at least three people. 19 people were injured, the regional governor said a missile attack on a bus parking lot in the city of Dnipro also killed one person and set 52 buses on fire.

On Saturday, Ukrainian officials revealed that another Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians took place last week, when Russian soldiers fired at close range at a convoy heading towards the city of Kupiansk. liberated in Kharkiv province.

At least 24 people were killed, including 13 children and a pregnant woman, said Vasyl Maliuk, acting head of Ukraine’s security service. In the two cars, children and their parents were burned alive, the security service later added.

The details of the attack could not be immediately confirmed; Russian authorities were not immediately available for comment.

Ukraine’s recapture of Lyman has brought the war for the Donbas region to a new stage, making Russia’s control of the region destabilizing as the Ukrainians are now in a position to recapture the territory before the summer season. winter begins.

The Ukrainian offensive is a continuation of the army northeastern attackThe force drove Russian forces from dozens of villages and recaptured more than a thousand square miles in the Kharkiv region last month.

In recent days and weeks, Ukrainian forces have also closed in from the south and west.

The next target, if the Ukrainian army continues to advance, will likely be Svatove, a city northeast of Lyman, where the Russians have retreated after their defeat in the northeast, according to analysts. analyst.

The Russian army in the Donbas, exhausted and losing ground, may face two options: divert resources from other areas of the front to slow Ukraine’s advance, or continue to lose ground. gradually parts of the region.

Ukraine’s slow offensive to the south, towards the port city of Kherson, has been largely overshadowed by events to the east. But fighting there still raged, as better-trained Russian forces resisted the Ukrainian advance.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reports from Rivne, Ukraine, Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv, Ukraine, Anton Troianovski from Berlin, and Catherine Porter from Paris. Matthew Mpoke Bigg contribution reports from London, Valerie Hopkins from Berlin and Michael Schwirtz from Kyiv, Ukraine.

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