Before the war, Severodonetsk, a city in Ukraine’s Luhansk province in the Donbass region, had a population of just over 100,000. It wasn’t even one of the forty largest cities in Ukraine. However, in the past month it has become the main battlefield of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Russian troops occupy the residential areas. Artillery-hit Ukrainian forces and several hundred civilians fled to the Azot industrial complex to the west. On June 14, Russia destroyed the last bridge connecting Severodonetsk with the nearby city of Lysyčansk. “In many ways, the fate of Donbass will be decided there,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on June 8. Why is Severodonetsk so important?
The city has played an exceptional role in the political and military conflict between Russia and Ukraine for the last twenty years. When protests broke out in Kyiv in 2004 over rigged elections, local politicians in Severodonetsk played a leading role in pro-independence protests, threatening to seek military aid from Russia. Ten years later, in 2014, protests toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president and Russia invaded Donbass, while pro-Russian forces occupied Severodonetsk from May to July until Ukrainian forces retook it. It has remained in Ukrainian hands ever since, north of the line of contact separating Russian and Ukrainian forces in the region.
A more humble pair of tongs
On February 24 of this year, Russia invaded Ukraine again and planned to surround Ukrainian forces in Donbass with a large pincer movement, rising north from the Azov Sea coast and south of Kharkiv to attack the city of Dnipro. But this maneuver proved overly ambitious, and Russian forces resorted to more modest pincers – a thrust south of Izyum and another north of Popasna – to seize a smaller Ukrainian portion wedged into Russian-controlled territory.
Severodonetsk is at the eastern end of this basin and is the gateway to the north-east of Donetsk province, the other part of the Donbass. It’s an easier target for Russia because the more advanced Ukrainian forces have less aviation and artillery cover.
The capture along with Lysyčansk would open a route west to Slovyansk, the first city to fall to the Russians in 2014, and Kramatorsk, an industrial hub. Russia attacked Sloviansk from the north, but had to break through. Ukraine is in an advantageous position, and at least one attempt to cross the Sieversky-Donets river in May ended in disaster.
Control of Severodonetsk would offer another route, albeit not an easy one, as the Russians would still have to cross the river and storm nearby Lysyčansk, which sits on a hill 150 meters (490 ft) higher than Severodonetsk. In that sense, the Severodonetsk battle is by no means a decisive one. But if Russia took it along with Lysycansk, it would effectively control the entire Luhansk province. And should Sloviansk and Kramatorsk eventually fall, Russia would also control almost every major city in Donetsk province. This, in turn, would allow it to claim that somehow it managed to achieve its stated goal of starting the war, which was to “liberate” Donbass.
Weeks ago, many expected the Ukrainian troops to withdraw from Severodonetsk. The city has little importance beyond its recent history and Lysyčansk is a more defensible place. Instead, Ukraine has counterattacked and is resisting. One of the goals is to pin down Russian forces and buy time until more western weapons arrive – US missile launchers are on their way. On June 15, British military intelligence said the Ukrainian resistance was preventing Russia from sending its troops elsewhere. A second goal is to inflict continuous casualties on Russia and further impoverish its ranks. A third reason is that the city is a more favorable battlefield for Ukraine’s favored urban warfare tactics than long-range open-field artillery battles, where Russia has the edge.
Resistance has its price. Severodonetsk was spared severe violence in 2014. Before the war, it was a “very nice, clean, and welcoming small town,” says Brian Milakovsky, who lived there for six years through January and worked on humanitarian and development issues. It has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years, Milakowski says, after replacing the occupied city of Luhansk as the region’s administrative capital and taking in refugees from other parts of the province. The sense of Ukrainian identity had grown. Severodonetsk “was by no means a city without a future,” he adds. However, now it is practically in ruins.
(Translation by Stefania Mascetti)