In Severodonetsk’s twin city of Lysychansk, residential buildings and private houses were destroyed, Gaidai said. “People are dying on the streets and in bomb shelters,” she added.
In Kharkov, Ukraine’s second-largest city, northwest of Lugansk, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its Iskander missiles had destroyed weapons recently supplied by Western countries.
The Russian army was trying to move closer to Kharkiv, which experienced heavy shelling in the first two months of the war, and turn it into a “front-line city”, a Ukrainian Interior Ministry official said.
West of the Donbas, Russian missiles hit a fuel storage depot in Novomoskovsk, killing two people and wounding 13, the head of the regional administration said. A video verified by Reuters showed thick black smoke billowing into the air.
To the south, Western weaponry had helped Ukrainian forces advance 10 kilometers into Russian-occupied Melitopol, its mayor said in a video posted on Telegram from outside the city. Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield reports.
Russia has said it has launched what it calls a “special military operation” to disarm its neighbor and protect Russian-speakers from dangerous nationalists. kyiv and its allies dismissed it as a baseless pretext for aggressive war.
