While eyes remain on Mariupol’s fate, which now seems sealed, Russia is not abandoning the other strategic goals of its offensive in Ukraine. The campaign to capture the entire Donbass territory, launched in recent days, remains the Kremlin’s priority and is now preparing to accelerate. According to experts, the same decision to stop the attack on the Azovstal steel plant bunkers, where the last defenders of Mariupol are barricaded, is suitable, according to experts, for the concentration of forces in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions. Beginning with artillery fire on the cities crucial to the advance, according to the doctrine of General Aleksander Dvornikov, in whose hands for several weeks the integrated command of Russian military operations has been concentrated: a tactic aimed at gaining land burned to give the infantry the To pave the way, following the example of the devastation in Chechnya and Syria.
According to Lugansk governor Serhiy Gaidai, Russian forces already control 80% of the area. Kreminna fell into Russian hands north of Severodonetsk, where at least 200 civilians were killed, according to Ukrainian authorities, and from there the offensive is heading towards the other strategic center for taking Donbass: Rubizhne, a dozen kilometers to the east. and Popasna, 60 km further south, also in the Lugansk area, which intensified ground attacks. In the latter city, clashes are now taking place within the urban area, with street-to-street fighting: a scuffle in which Moscow is alleged to be involving Syrian and Libyan mercenaries and the Wagner Group’s contractors.
Raging shelling has been reported in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the Russian border, where Moscow says most of the 450 targets hit in the past 24 hours are located. Here, on the Izyum front, where the Russian 106th Airborne Division operates, a decisive battle takes place, which is met with resistance from the Ukrainian Paras. Several villages are targeted, including Sulyhivka and Dibrivne, from where the attack on Sloviansk is supposed to start. Counter-offensives claimed by Kyiv, however, do not stop targeting the strategic node of Kupyansk, which is crucial for the logistical control of the war effort in Moscow. Which, however, has not given up on raids west of the Donbass, particularly in the Zaporizhia and Dnipro oblasts.
Mykolayiv, a strategic bastion defending Odessa, also continued to be bombed. In the largely Russian-controlled stretch of coast on the Sea of Azov, symbolic attempts at annexation with piloted referendums continue, while amid celebrations in various centers the Soviet red flag of victory in World War II begins to fly from May 9, including Kherson.
Where Russian troops have retreated, however, the death toll and horrors continue. According to Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanichyna, the bodies of 1,020 civilians are currently being found in the morgues of the Kyiv region, “recovered from buildings, but also on the streets”.