- Ukraine’s recovery of Lyman is a major setback for Moscow
- Chechen leader suggests using low-yield nuclear weapon
- Lyman is a key logistics hub in eastern Donetsk region
- Donetsk is one of four regions that Putin says are now Russian
Kyiv, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Ukrainian troops said they had retaken the key Lyman stronghold in occupied eastern Ukraine, a stinging defeat that prompted a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin to call for the possible use of ‘low-grade nuclear weapons.
Saturday’s capture came just a day after Putin proclaimed the annexation of nearly a fifth of Ukraine – including Donetsk, where Lyman is based – and placed the regions under Russia’s nuclear umbrella. Kyiv and the West condemned the ornate ceremony as an illegitimate farce.
Ukrainian soldiers announced the capture in a video recorded in front of the city hall building in downtown Lyman and posted on social media.
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“Dear Ukrainians, today the armed forces of Ukraine … liberated and took control of the settlement of Lyman in the Donetsk region,” says one of the soldiers. At the end of the video, a group of soldiers cheer and throw Russian flags from the roof of the building and raise a Ukrainian flag in its place.
Hours earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry had announced that it was withdrawing troops from the area “in connection with the creation of an encirclement threat”.
Lyman had fallen in May to Russian forces, who had used it as a logistics and transport hub for their operations in the northern Donetsk region. Its capture is Ukraine’s biggest battlefield gain since the lightning counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region last month.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy promised faster successes in the Donbas, which covers the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are largely under Russian control.
“Over the last week, the number of Ukrainian flags in the Donbass has increased. There will be even more in a week,” he said in a video address in the evening.
Ukraine’s armed forces said in a statement Sunday morning that its planes had carried out 29 strikes in the past 24 hours, destroying weapons and anti-aircraft missile systems, while ground troops had hit command posts, warehouses containing munitions and anti-aircraft missile complexes. .
Russian forces launched four missiles and 16 airstrikes and used Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones to attack infrastructure, the Ukrainian statement said, adding that more than 30 settlements were damaged, mainly in the south and -East.
Reuters was unable to verify the battlefield claims from either side
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Lyman’s capture would create new problems for the Russian military. “We’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing right now,” Austin said at a news conference Saturday.
Austin noted that Lyman was located across the supply lines that Russia has used to push its troops and equipment south and west as the Kremlin presses its invasion of Ukraine for more than seven months. .
“Without these avenues, it will be more difficult. So it presents a kind of dilemma for the Russians going forward.”
Austin did not say whether he thought Ukraine’s capture of Lyman could lead to Russian escalation, although U.S. officials have widely denounced Russia’s nuclear rhetoric in recent days and President Joe Biden has publicly urged Putin not to use nuclear weapons.
Ukraine’s successes have infuriated Putin allies such as Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s southern Chechnya region.
“In my personal opinion, more drastic measures should be taken, up to the declaration of martial law in border areas and the use of low-yield nuclear weapons,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram before Zelenskiy spoke .
Other senior officials, including former President Dmitry Medvedev, have suggested that Russia may have to resort to nuclear weapons, but Kadyrov’s call was the most urgent and explicit.
Putin said last week he was not bluffing when he said he was ready to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity” by all available means, and on Friday he made clear that this extends to new regions claimed by Moscow .
Washington says it would respond decisively to any use of nuclear weapons.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, said the Russian military in its current state almost certainly could not operate in a field of nuclear battle even though it has historically been trained to do so.
“The chaotic agglomeration of exhausted contract soldiers, reservists, conscripts and hastily mobilized mercenaries that currently comprise Russian ground forces could not function in a nuclear environment. Any area affected by Russian tactical nuclear weapons would therefore be impassable to Russians, probably preventing it. Russian advances,” ISW said.
LOGISTICS CENTER
Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern forces, said before the capture that Russia had between 5,000 and 5,500 troops at Lyman, but that the circled number could be lower.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said Lyman’s recovery is one of the key factors in regaining lost territory in neighboring Luhansk, the full capture of which Moscow announced in early July after weeks of advances
“The liberation of this city in the Donetsk region is one of the key factors for further unemployment in the Luhansk region,” Gaidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday.
Donbass has been a major focus for Russia since it soon launched the February 24 invasion that Putin calls a “special military operation” to demilitarize and “desazify” its smaller neighbor.
The areas that Putin claimed as Russian – the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – form a strip of territory equal to 18% of Ukraine’s total area.
Germany said it will deliver the first of four advanced IRIS-T air defense systems to Ukraine in the coming days to help prevent drone attacks.
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Reporting by Tom Balmforth and Pavel Polityuk; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landy, Felix Light, Mark Trevelyan and David Ljunggren; Written by Tom Balmforth and Kim Coghill; Editing by Daniel Wallis and William Mallard
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