About 800 people, including children, are hiding beneath a chemical factory in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, now 80% held by Russian troops, as more western allies promise additional missile systems and arms to Kyiv.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk, said on Thursday that bitter street fighting continued in the city, where Ukrainian forces have pledged to fight “to the end”.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine neared its 100th day, he said 800 people were hiding in Soviet-era bomb shelters beneath the Azot factory. “There are locals there, who were asked to leave the city but refused,” he said. “Also children, though not many.”
The British defence ministry said that while the main road into Sievierodonetsk remained under Ukrainian control, Russia had taken most of the city and “continues to make steady local gains, enabled by a heavy concentration of artillery”.
Ukraine’s armed forces general staff said the invading forces were “conducting assault operations inside Sievierodonetsk” and also attacking other parts in the east and north-east of the city. At least four civilians had been killed and 10 wounded there, officials said.
Capturing Sievierodonetsk would give the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, control of all of Luhansk – the region that, with Donetsk, makes up Ukraine’s Donbas industrial heartland – consolidating a shift in battlefield momentum after his forces were pushed back from the capital, Kyiv, and northern Ukraine.
Russian forces now occupy about 20% of Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said, with the frontlines stretching across more than 620 miles (1,000km). More than 12 million Ukrainians had been displaced and more than 5 million had left the country, Zelenskiy told Luxembourg’s parliament.
“We have to defend ourselves against almost the entire Russian army. All combat-ready Russian military formations are involved in this aggression,” Zelenskiy said, adding that 100 Ukrainians were dying every day in eastern Ukraine and another 450-500 were being wounded.
The president said that in 2014 Kremlin-backed separatists and the Russian military controlled Ukrainian territory roughly equivalent in size to the Netherlands. That area had more than trebled to about 125,000 sq km, and nearly twice as much again had been “polluted” with mines and unexploded ordnance.
The fall of Sievierodonetsk would facilitate Putin’s drive into nearby Donetsk. The regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Thursday that Russian forces were trying to push south through Lyman and Izyum towards the key cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
As the ground war raged on, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, thanked the US for a new $700m (£566m) weapons package it announced on Wednesday, including high mobility artillery rocket systems that can hit targets up to 50 miles away.
“Advanced American systems will help our brave armed forces to defend Ukrainian land from Russian invaders,” Kuleba tweeted. His Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, accused the US of “pouring fuel on the fire”, but the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said Ukraine had promised not to use the systems to hit targets inside Russia.
Britain also said it would send sophisticated medium-range rocket systems to Ukraine in a move “closely coordinated” with the US. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said the UK would send an unspecified number of M270 launchers – similar to the US Himars” systems – and that Ukrainian troops would be trained in the UK to use them.
The Swedish government announced on Thursday it would provide Ukraine with more economic aid and military equipment, including anti-ship missiles, rifles and anti-tank weapons, saying it “sees a continuing need” to support Ukraine. Germany said on Wednesday it would supply anti-aircraft missiles and radar systems.
Moscow again denounced the large-scale provision of western arms to Ukraine. The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the “pumping” of weapons “will bring more suffering to Ukraine, which is merely a tool in the hands of those countries that supply it with weapons”.
Peskov threatened “absolutely undesirable and rather unpleasant scenarios” if Ukrainian forces “hypothetically try to use these weapons against targets on our territory”, saying such a decision would “significantly change the situation in an unfavourable direction”.
On the diplomatic front, the US president, Joe Biden, was due to meet the Nato secretary general in Washington. Jens Stoltenberg said he would also convene a meeting soon with Swedish, Finnish and Turkish officials to discuss Turkey’s continued opposition to Sweden and Finland joining the US-led defence alliance.
The Danish foreign minister, Jeppe Kofod, said on Thursday he expected Denmark to join the EU’s common defence policy on 1 July after a referendum on Wednesday in which two-thirds of voters backed abandoning Copenhagen’s 30-year-old opt-out.
Amid mounting fears over the war’s impact on world food supplies, Putin is due to meet the head of the African Union, Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, on Friday to discuss “freeing up stocks of cereals and fertilisers”, Sall’s office said. The meeting, in the south-western Russian city of Sochi, was organised at the Kremlin’s invitation, Dakar said.
Ukraine and Russia are major suppliers of wheat and other cereals to Africa, while Russia is a key producer of fertiliser.
