Russian forces have taken the city of Kreminna in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region and Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the city, the regional governor said.
Kreminna, a city of more than 18,000 people about 560 km southeast of the capital Kyiv, appears to be the first city to be captured in a Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
“Kreminna is under the control of the ‘Orcs’ [Russians]. They invaded the city,” Lugansk region governor Serhiy Gaidai said at a briefing on Tuesday. “Our defenders had to withdraw. They have entrenched themselves in new positions and continue to fight against the Russian army.”
He said Russian troops attacked “from all sides”.
“It is impossible to calculate the number of civilian deaths. We have official statistics – about 200 dead – but in reality there are many more,” he said, without making clear what period the estimated death toll covered.
Russia denies attacks on civilians.
Evacuated residents of the city said they could not reach relatives and friends there.
Olena Stetsenko, head of the Kreminna-based volunteer organization City Korupus, was evacuated from the city in mid-March. Stetsenko was one of the last to reach anyone in the city before her cellphone signal went completely dead around noon on Monday, she said, hours after Russian forces reportedly took the city.
There was a pattern of Ukrainian towns and villages losing cellular connectivity shortly after falling under Russian occupation.
“My relative said [on Monday] that Russian planes and helicopters were flying over the city,” Stetsenko said. “They said that [the Russians] used every single type of heavy equipment: graduates [rocket launchers]Tank.
“Since yesterday they were in the outskirts of the city and there was street fighting. That [Russians] afraid to come to the city because of mines,” said Stetsenko, who estimates that about 3,500 residents still live in the city.
Natalia Chekhuta, head of the Kreminna regional administration from 2015 to 2019, said she was devastated. Chekhuta, who is still the city’s regional councillor, said she has been conducting voluntary evacuation missions since the war began. Initially, not many people wanted to evacuate, she said, but in the last three weeks evacuations have started “en masse”.
Chekhuta and her team were heading to Kreminna to collect people on April 18 when Russian troops broke through Ukrainian defenses and entered the city. Ukrainian soldiers in a neighboring town would not let them pass. She found out that a family had tried to flee and their car was shot at – two of them died and another was injured.
“The people we were going to pick up called me and asked me to come anyway,” Chekhuta said. “It was so hard; We haven’t had any contact since then.”
On Saturday April 16, two days before Russian troops occupied the city, the Guardian traveled there to witness the latest evacuation of Kreminna residents.
In central Kreminna on Saturday, a white armored bus pulled up on a modest street corner and civilians rushed toward the vehicle from basements beneath battered apartment blocks, bags and pets in their arms. The conductor of the armored evacuation bus, operated by the local NGO Vostok SOS, stuffed their belongings into the hold.
A woman is helped as she walks to a bus evacuating residents of Kreminna on Saturday. Photo: Ed Ram/The GuardianThe 17 evacuees hugged their loved ones and said their goodbyes in tears against the backdrop of the not-too-distant boom. Those who stayed watched as the bus peeled away from the cover of the arches of the Soviet-era apartment blocks.
A stone’s throw from the pickup point in Kreminna, debris from a recent attack blocked access and the bus was forced to take a longer and more dangerous detour around the city, amid the constant threat of more artillery shells.
An elderly man with walking and vision problems was led to the bus by a younger man. A tense group effort was made to lift him onto the bus and get his legs into a position to sit down. The bus then picked up a middle-aged woman who was accompanied by a man who kissed her goodbye in the aisle before jumping off.
Victoria Slobodyansk, a 61-year-old retired English teacher who was traveling with her husband Oleksandr, their cat in a basket on her lap and a guinea pig in a bag at her feet, said she was going because of the pictures she was taking had seen Bucha and Hostomel, two cities in the Kyiv region devastated under Russian occupation.
Speaking after her evacuation from a town in the Dnipro region, Slobodyansk said she tried to contact her friends and helped other people contact their relatives, but to no avail.
The bus is loaded with luggage before people are evacuated from the city. Photo: Ed Ram/The Guardian“Someone who is in France and hasn’t heard from their grandfather in 48 hours asked me to call,” she said. “I know people who live in the same block of flats, but none of them have signal.
“We’re all so worried. All our souls ache for Kreminna. It’s a small town but it’s clean and pretty and we all love it very much.”
Slobodyansk said before she left the city there had been no gas for three weeks. She said the power had been cut several times, although local workers managed to restore the connection on April 15. She said residents cooked on the street when there was no electricity.
“We knew it was going to be tough and we knew they were going to bomb us, but our guys would manage to withstand them,” Slobodyansk said. “But we understand that it was difficult for her; they have defended their positions for weeks.”
Reuters contributed to this report