10 V2 Friday April 8 2022 | the times
News
Ukraine needs new and heavy weapon-
ry immediately as a bloody battle for
the Donbas region gets under way in
the east, the country’s foreign minister
told Nato allies yesterday.
During talks in Brussels, Dmytro
Kuleba said his country needed “weap-
ons, weapons, weapons”, as thousands
of people fled towns and cities in the
eastern part of the country in advance
of an impending major assault.
President Putin’s forces have been re-
grouping in advance of an assault on
the Donbas, a region that has been con-
tested since Russia’s invasion of Crimea
in 2014. Yesterday, in a tacit admission
of the toll the war had taken on Russia,
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,
said: “We have significant losses of
troops. And it’s a huge tragedy for us.”
However, the prospect of sustained
conflict in the region has prompted
mass evacuations, even in cities outside
the historic borders of the Donbas. Yes-
terday, the mayor of Dnipro, a major
urban centre that before the war was
home to one million people, urged all
those who could flee to do so before the
expected Russian attack.
“This involves women, children, the
elderly, those who are not... directly
integrated into the economy,” said
Borys Filatov. “The situation in the
Donbas is gradually heating up, and
we understand that April will be rather
intense.”
Efforts to evacuate the 700,000 civil-
ians still trapped there were dealt a
blow, however, when Russian aircraft
attacked a rail line connecting the east-
ern cities of Slovyansk and Kramo-
torsk. Engineers were trying to repair
the rails as desperate families crowded
onto platforms at Kramotorsk station.
Kuleba, meanwhile, suggested the
worst of the fighting was yet to come in
the Donbas. In impassioned remarks to
Send weapons now
for Donbas battle,
plead Ukrainians
Larisa Brown Defence Editor
Bruno Waterfield Brussels
George Grylls
Nato, he said that, “as we speak”, the
battle was “under way but has not yet
reached its ultimate scale”.
“The battle for Donbas will remind
you of the Second World War, with
large operations, manoeuvres, the in-
volvement of thousands of tanks, ar-
moured vehicles, planes, artillery,” he
told western allies. “Russia has its plan,
we have ours — and the outcome will
be decided on the battlefield.”
He said that unless they were forth-
coming with the equipment Ukraine
needed now, their help would come too
late. Ukraine urged Germany “to do
more” and criticised allies that remain
reluctant to send so-called “offensive”
arms such as tanks and aircraft.
“This distinction between defensive
and offensive doesn’t make any sense
when it comes to the situation in my
country,” he said — comments that
have been echoed by British officials in
the talks.
Russia’s six-week-old invasion failed
to take Ukraine’s capital quickly and
achieve what western countries say was
Putin’s initial aim of ousting the
Ukrainian government. The Kremlin’s
focus is now on the Donbas, a mostly
Russian-speaking region.
Oleksandr Gruzevich, the deputy
chief of staff of Ukraine’s ground forces,
said that Russia was likely to renew its
attack on Kyiv if its forces succeed in
taking full control of the Donbas.
Speaking at an online briefing about ef-
forts to defend the capital, he said: “It is
likely the enemy has not given up the
goal of a second attack on Kyiv — there
is such a threat.”
General Mark Milley, chairman of
the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Con-
gress that Ukrainian forces had
successfully managed to counter
Russia’s attempt to take Kyiv but that a
significant battle still lay ahead in the
southeast of the country. “I think it is an
open question, right now, how this
ends,” he said.
Tobias Ellwood, chairman of thedefence select committee, told Times
Radio: “Time is not on our side. We are
about to enter a darker chapter in the
Donbas region. They are going to oblit-
erate that area.”
Ellwood said that if Russia moved
further along the coast and took the
Black Sea port city of Odesa then the
country would become landlocked. He
said that western allies should imple-
ment a humanitarian zone around the
port, bringing in Nato ships to protect
the city from Russian attacks.
Ukraine’s armed forces said that
Russia had fired rockets, bombs and ar-
tillery on civilian infrastructure in the
Donbas region, adding that the port of
Berdyansk was being used to transfer
weapons, military equipment and per-
sonnel.
The defending forces are close to
losing control of Izyum, a town on the
border of Donetsk, which has been
resisting a Russian advance for weeks.
Slovyansk and Kramotorsk, the next
two cities along the main road into the
province, are likely to become the new
front line of the assault, according to
analysts.
Attempted offensives by the Russians
in the areas of Marinka, Borivske and
Solodke in the east were unsuccessful,
according to Ukraine’s military update.
It warned the Russians were soon
likely to try to break through Ukraine’s
defence in the districts of Severodo-
netsk, Avdiivka and Kurakhov in the
Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary,
pledged that Britain would answer
Ukraine’s call for modern weaponry to
help it turn the tide as the war enters a
decisive phase.
“We agreed to help Ukrainian forces
move from their Soviet-era equipment
to Nato-standard equipment on a bilat-
eral basis,” Truss said, emphasising that
Putin’s war objectives to control the
whole of Ukraine remained the same
despite his redeployment of Russian
forces to the east.AZOV SEABLACK SEA 50 milesDniproPoltavaChernihivOdesaUKRAINERUSSIABELARUSCRIMEARostov-
on-DonSumyMakarivKonotopKhersonChernobyl
nuclear plantMykolaivKharkivMariupol
K BerdyanskKyivUKRAINESources: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project; Ministry of Defence. Updated April 07Direction of Russian
troop advance
Previous advance
Russian-held territory
Russian advances
Surrounded by
Russian troops
Ukrainian
counteroffensiveMelitopolIntense fighting
in past 24 hoursMMMMIzyum
Kramotorsk SlovyanskVozdvyzhenka Novoselivka DruhaAvdiivkaLuhanskDonetsk
Donbas region
SchevchenkoveThe priest was away when the Russian
artillery barrage began. So the church
bells that usually herald an aerial
onslaught stayed silent.
Among those rushing for shelter as
shells exploded around them was
Svitlana Borysovna, 74, a vet who also
works at the pharmacy in Schevchen-
kove.
“He’s gone to another town today,”
she said of the priest in the village, less
than 40 miles from Russian-occupied
Kherson. “Hopefully, nobody will be
wounded or die today and his services
won’t be needed.”
Only 100 people remain of the 3,
who lived in Schevchenkove before it
became the front line of Ukraine’stime in the basements. I can recognise
the sound of incoming missiles. They
almost don’t frighten me. But there is a
certain type of shell that makes a whis-
tling sound and I don’t like that.”
Near by a pensioner, Vitya, helped to
put out fires caused by the shelling. She
said the Ukrainian army was no longer
in the village and could not understand
why the Russians were attacking.
“Perhaps they are just taking outNews War in Ukraine
Retreating invaders disorganised and
counterattack against Russian forces.
The village is largely unrecognisable,
they said, with gaping holes punched
through homes and many buildings
partially or completely ruined.
Yet the Ukrainians have fought back
and are now advancing towards Kher-
son, at present under Russian rule and
the first big city to fall after the invasion
began. Officers said that they were
hoping Kyiv would launch an attack on
Kherson within days.
After about an hour of the artillery
assault, the villagers emerged from
their makeshift shelters in basements.
Most were silent. Some returned to the
fields to tend vegetable plots that have
become an essential source of food as
the war drags on.
The allotments are not far from the
graves for the dozens of villagers who
have died over the past month. Seven
more were buried this week, they said.
Borysovna walked back to her phar-
macy. “This is where I have lived and
worked for more than 40 years and
these Russians aren’t going to make me
leave,” she said. “I have spent a lot ofUkrainian soldiers hope
to liberate the city of
Kherson next, reports
Askold Krushelnycky
from Schevchenkove
After 40 years in the village Svitlana
Borysovna refused to be scared out