https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/27/world/russia-ukraine-war/lyman-is-the-second-midsize-ukrainian-city-to-fall-to-russias-forces-this-week?smid=url-share
Lyman is the second midsize Ukrainian city to fall to Russia’s forces this week.
POKROVSK, Ukraine — Russian forces’ capturing of the eastern city of Lyman, which both Russian and Ukrainian officials confirmed on Friday, makes it the second midsize Ukrainian city to change hands this week.
And with Russia’s artillery superiority in the fighting on the rolling plains of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine — where Moscow has focused its war effort after losses around the capital, Kyiv, and in the country’s north — it is apparently close to seizing the easternmost Ukrainian city still under Ukrainian control, Sievierodonetsk.
The capture of Lyman, a city with a prewar population of about 20,000 near a strategic highway, followed intense artillery bombardments, including from one of the most fearsome weapons in Russia’s conventional arsenal, a rocket artillery system firing thermobaric explosives. Also known as fuel-air bombs, these explosives set off huge, destructive shock waves.
The weapons’ use highlighted the pyrrhic victories Russia was achieving with the artillery-heavy tactics as its ground forces pushed into cities already reduced to rubble by the artillery support needed for their capture.
Yet Lyman’s fall also underscored the Russian Army’s ability to gain ground using its artillery bombardments and creeping advances. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Army withdrew from the city of Svitlodarsk to avoid becoming surrounded.
And after weeks of grinding artillery bombardments, a Russian assault force entered Sievierodonetsk on Friday, Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk region’s military administration, told the Ukrainian news media. The fighting centered on an outlying district of the city near a hotel, Mir Hotel.
Lyman is close to a highway connecting the cities of Sloviansk and Sievierodonetsk, although Ukraine can still supply Sievierodonetsk via another highway farther south.
The claim of the capture of Lyman came in a statement from a Russian-backed separatist entity, the Donetsk People’s Republic. “A group of forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics with artillery support from the Russian armed forces liberated and established full control over” Lyman, the group said in a statement on Friday. It used the Soviet-era name for the city, Krasny Lyman, or Red Lyman.
Ukrainian officials acknowledged the city’s loss. “Most of Lyman is not controlled by the Ukrainian military,” the head of the Donetsk region’s military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, told the Ukrainian news media. “There was a regrouping of the armed forces in order to take fortified positions.”
The bombardments by Russia’s military have ground away at Ukraine’s defenses. On Tuesday, the mayor of Svitlodarsk, Serhiy Hoshko, said the city had fallen.
The thermobaric weapon now in use in the war in the east — called a Tos-1 but nicknamed Solntsepek, or Sunshine — was fired into Lyman on Tuesday, according to a drone video posted online by Ukrainian officials that showed huge fireballs bursting with the incoming rockets.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on Twitter on Friday about the weapons system, attaching a video of its purported use in Lyman.
Russia “already uses the heaviest non-nuclear weapons against” Ukraine, “burning people alive,” the adviser wrote, adding that “maybe it’s time to respond and give us” rocket artillery systems as well.
