Ukraine Forces Retake Lyman, a Strategic City, as Russians Retreat

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https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xt3rnx/while_we_celebrate_the_heroes_who_took_back_lyman/

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https://archived.moe/news/thread/1100049

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Ukraine Forces Retake Lyman, a Strategic City, as Russians Retreat - The New York Times

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Russia’s withdrawal from the city comes one day after Moscow illegally annexed the surrounding region. Russian troops withdrew from Lyman, a city in eastern Ukraine, one day after President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed four regions in the country. The Russian retreat quickly spawned withering criticism among powerful allies of Mr. Putin, who blamed Russia’s military leaders for the recent losses, calling them incompetent. It was a striking display of internal dissent after Mr. Putin made a show of force in Moscow on Friday, delivering a menacing speech in which he announced the annexation of the swaths of Ukrainian territory, and positioned the war as an existential battle between Russia and Western elites.

Lyman sits on the banks of the meandering Siversky Donets River, which has served as a natural division between Russian and Ukrainian front lines since Russian forces captured the city in May. Retaking it offers Ukrainian forces a strategic foothold for further advances into the Donbas region that has long been the focus of Mr. Putin’s aims. Lyman’s capture also puts additional pressure on the Kremlin, which has been facing blowback at home over the conscription of hundreds of thousands of men to fight in Ukraine. The Russian government said on Saturday that its troops were withdrawing from the city after a Ukrainian offensive.

The army “will always have the decisive vote in today’s and any future ‘referendums,’” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry wrote in a tweet, in a pointed reference to Russia’s sham vote for annexation in the Ukrainian territory. Hours later, Russia’s Ministry of Defense announced it was withdrawing its troops from the city.

The State of the War

ImageCrossing a destroyed bridge in Kupiansk, a city recently reclaimed by Ukrainian forces, on Friday. Ukrainian officials have consistently said they will disregard Russia’s territorial claims and press ahead with counteroffensives in eastern Ukraine and around the southern port city of Kherson. The Pentagon’s top official on Saturday praised the Ukrainian military’s breakthrough in Lyman as a major success. “Absolutely, it’s significant,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.

Lyman sits astride the supply lines of the Russians, and they’ve used those routes to push men and materiel down to the south and to the west. The fury over the retreat from powerful allies of Mr. Putin added to the chorus of pro-war Russian bloggers criticizing the government’s military leadership.

Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Russia’s top military brass had “covered for” an “incompetent” general who should now be “sent to the front to wash his shame off with blood. Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian General Staff, that the forces on the Lyman front had been left without sufficient communications and ammunition supplies. “Send all these pieces of garbage barefoot with machine guns straight to the front,” Mr. Prigozhin said, in an apparent reference to Russia’s military leaders. ImageMedical staff treating a Ukrainian soldier and a civilian injured by artillery fire at a military field hospital in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Saturday.

Yet, even as Russian forces were losing a battle on the ground, they were unleashing a salvo of rocket, drone and missile strikes from the air. The most lethal strike landed on Friday in Zaporizhzhia, one of four Ukrainian areas that the Kremlin claimed in its trumped-up annexation. The attack sprayed shrapnel into a line of about 200 civilian cars and minivans packed with luggage and passengers, waiting at a checkpoint and bus stop to cross into Russian-occupied territory to visit relatives or ferry medicine and other humanitarian supplies across the frontline. ImageThe crater left by a Russian missile strike on a civilian convoy in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Friday.

“There was just peaceful population, there are absolutely no military bases or soldiers. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine condemned the strike also, as did Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Also on Friday, rockets and Iranian-made kamikaze drones that Russia’s military recently acquired hit residential neighborhoods in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, killing at least three people and wounding 19, the regional governor said.

A missile strike on a bus parking lot in the city of Dnipro also killed one person and ignited a fire that burned 52 buses. On Saturday, Ukrainian officials revealed that another Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians had taken place the previous week, when Russian soldiers fired at close range at a convoy heading toward the recently liberated city of Kupiansk in Kharkiv Province. At least 24 people were killed, including 13 children and a pregnant woman, said Vasyl Maliuk, the acting head of the security service of Ukraine. Ukraine’s recapture of Lyman put the battle for the Donbas region into a new phase, leaving Russia’s control of the area uncertain as the Ukrainians are now positioned to claw back territory before winter sets in.

ImageDistributing aid to civilians in the recently liberated city of Izium, in the eastern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, on Saturday. In recent days and weeks, Ukrainian forces also closed in from the south and west. The next target, if the Ukrainian military continues its advance, would likely be Svatove, a city northeast of Lyman where Russians have retrenched after their defeat in the northeast, according to analysts. Ukraine’s slow-moving offensive in the south, toward the port city of Kherson, has largely been overshadowed by events in the east.

But fighting there remains fierce, as better-trained Russian forces have put up staunch resistance against advancing Ukrainian troops. ImageUkrainian soldiers in Bakhmut on Saturday. Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London, Valerie Hopkins from Berlin and Michael Schwirtz from Kyiv, Ukraine.