‘Brutal’ battle for Ukraine’s Sievierodonetsk will determine fate of Donbas,

KYIV/SLOVIANSK, Ukraine, June 9 (Reuters) – The battle for the Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk is brutal and will determine the fate of the Donbas region, the country’s president said, as Russian troops lay waste to the city in an assault aimed at controlling eastern Ukraine.

After failing to take control of the capital Kyiv, the Kremlin says it is now seeking to completely “liberate” the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists broke away from Ukrainian government control in 2014.

Around a third of the Donbas was held by the separatists before the Feb. 24 invasion.

“This is a very brutal battle, very tough, perhaps one of the most difficult throughout this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video statement on Wednesday.

“Sievierodonetsk remains the epicentre of the encounter in Donbas … Largely, that is where the fate of our Donbas is being decided now,” he added.

Ukrainian fighters pulled back to the city’s outskirts on Wednesday but have vowed to fight there for as long as possible.

“The enemy fired on our units with mortars, artillery and multiple rocket launchers,” the Ukraine general staff said on Thursday.”It fired on civilian infrastructure in the settlements of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, Privillya, Ustynivka, Horske and Katerynivka.”

Russia denies targeting civilians.

Artillery shelling has turned the city in Ukraine’s Luhansk province to a bombed-out wasteland. Luhansk’s regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said the centre of the town was being destroyed.

Gaidai said a chemical plant has been shelled in Sievierodonetsk and four civilians had been died in the region over the past 24 hours.

Ukrainian forces still control all of Sievierodonetsk’s smaller twin city Lysychansk on the west bank of the Siverskyi Donets River, but Russian forces were destroying residential buildings there, Gaidai said.

Reuters could not independently verify the situation on the ground in either city.

Kyiv’s ambassador to the United States told CNN that Ukrainian troops were vastly outnumbered in Luhansk and Donetsk, which collectively form the Donbas, a largely Russian-speaking region.

But “as we already saw in the battle for Kyiv, we can lose something temporarily. Of course, we’re trying to minimize that because we know what (can) happen (when) Russians control territories, but we will get it back,” Oksana Markarova said.

Gaidai said Russia now controlled more than 98% of Luhansk.

‘GOD SAVED ME’

West of Sievierodonetsk in Sloviansk, one of the main Donbas cities in Ukrainian hands, women with small children lined up to collect aid on Wednesday while other residents carried buckets of water across the city.

Most residents have fled but authorities say around 24,000 remain in the city, in the path of an expected assault by Russian forces regrouping to the north.

Albina Petrovna, 85, described the moment her building was caught in an attack, which left her windows shattered and her balcony…