Vladimir Putin has declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk and told Russian troops to rest and “increase their combat capabilities”, a day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining stronghold in the province.
Ukraine’s military command confirmed on Sunday evening that its troops had been forced to pull back from the city of Lysychansk in Luhansk, and the regional governor has warned that Russian forces are trying to seize the entire Donetsk region, which, with Luhansk, makes up the industrial heartland of Donbas.
On Monday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin that “the operation” in Luhansk was complete. The Russian president said the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities”.
Since abandoning an assault on the capital, Kyiv, Russia has concentrated its military operation on Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatist proxies have been fighting Ukraine since 2014. The Russians control about half of Donetsk.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, said he expected the Donetsk cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut to come under heavy attack as Russia attempts to take full control of Donbas.
“The loss of the Luhansk region is painful because it is the territory of Ukraine,” Haidai told Reuters. “For me personally, this is special. This is the homeland where I was born and I am also the head of the region.”
The governor said that while Ukrainian forces’ withdrawal from Lysychansk “hurts a lot … it’s not losing the war”. He said the retreat from Lysychansk had been “centralised” and orderly, and had been carried out to save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers who were in danger of being surrounded.
“[Russian forces] will not transfer 100% of their troops to some front because they need to hold the line. If they leave their positions then ours can carry out some kind of counteroffensive,” he said. “Still, for them goal number one is the Donetsk region. Sloviansk and Bakhmut will come under attack – Bakhmut has already started being shelled very hard.”
Bakhmut, Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk lie south-west of Lysychansk and are the main urban areas holding out against Russian forces in Donetsk.
Haidai said the weeks-long battle for Lysychansk had drawn in Russian troops that could have been fighting on other fronts, and had given Ukraine’s forces time to build fortifications in the Donetsk region to make it “harder for the Russians there”.
He added: “The [Russian] tactics will be the same. They will shoot at everything with their artillery, but it will be difficult for them to move forward.”
Haidai reiterated calls for Ukraine’s western allies to provide more arms, saying they had “understood too late” what was happening. He said the country’s armed forces would launch a counteroffensive when they had sufficient long-range weapons. “They just shoot our positions around the clock from a distance,” he said of the Russians.
An intelligence briefing on Monday from the UK’s Ministry of Defence said Russian forces would “almost certainly” switch to trying to capture Donetsk. The briefing said the conflict in Donbas had been “grinding and attritional” and this was unlikely to change in the coming weeks.
The general staff of the Ukrainian military said Russian forces were focusing their efforts on pushing toward the line of Siversk, Fedorivka and Bakhmut in Donetsk.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, acknowledged the loss of Lysychansk on Sunday night and said the area would be retaken. “If the command of our army withdraws people from certain points of the front where the enemy has the greatest fire superiority – in particular this applies to Lysychansk – it means only one thing: we will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons.”
On Monday, the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, told an international conference that rebuilding his war-ravaged country would cost around $750bn (£620bn).
Speaking at the opening of the Ukraine recovery conference in Switzerland, Shmyhal said the confiscated assets of Russia and Russian oligarchs should be used to help Ukraine put itself back together.
“The Russian authorities unleashed this bloody war, they caused this massive destruction, and they should be held accountable for it,” he said.
Speaking via video message, Zelenskiy said the reconstruction was not the “local task of a single nation” but rather “a common task of the whole democratic world”.
The two-day conference, held under tight security in the southern Swiss city of Lugano, had been planned well before the invasion, and had originally been slated to discuss reforms in Ukraine before being repurposed to focus on reconstruction.
Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
