Arthur Greene
The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that the bloody battle for the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk may decide the outcome of the war.
The city has emerged as a key battleground between Russia and Ukraine in recent weeks, and Zelensky says it has become the location of a “very brutal” fight that is “perhaps one of the most difficult throughout this war”.
Sievierodonetsk is located in the Donbas region, which has been the focus of the Russian invasion ever since Russian president Vladimir Putin gave up on his botched attempts to seize the cities of Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv in April.
There is little doubt that up until this point, Russia was losing the war. However, since it has focused its forces in the country’s eastern region, it has made slow gains at the expense of heavy losses.
What was supposed to be a swift military operation to “decapitate” Ukraine’s government has instead become a bloody war of attrition.
A third of all of Russia’s military forces in Ukraine are reportedly situated in Sievierodonetsk, and according to one report, they outnumber Ukraine’s army there by 10-to-1.
A small factory city, Sievierodonetsk is not strategically significant but it is the only city besides Lysychansk preventing Russia from having full control of the region of Luhansk.
It became the centre of the invasion when Ukrainian forces, aware that they couldn’t overpower the Russians in rural Luhansk, drew them into the city.
“We dragged the Russian troops into a trap in Sievierodonetsk, pretending to ‘surrender’ the city,” wrote Aleksey Arestovich, the adviser to the head of the President’s Office, on his Facebook page.
Arestovich reported that Ukrainian forces then initiated a counter-attack and reclaimed a substantial amount of territory.
For weeks, Russian forces have laid waste to it, bombarding it with airstrikes, mortar strikes and even homing grenades.
Ukraine says its aim is to hold the city for as long as it can, persisting with street-by-street warfare to further deplete Russia’s already diminished forces. Each side has already incurred losses of hundreds of soldiers fighting the battle.
As is the case with the wider war over Ukraine, it has become a question of whose army will be the last one standing.
