Russia withdraws from key eastern city of Lyman as Ukrainians advance

Russia withdrew from the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman on Saturday, less than 24 hours after Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of the area and vowed to defend it with all military means.

The defence ministry said Russian forces retreated “to more advantageous heights” to avoid “the threat of being surrounded” as Ukraine’s counter-offensive closed in on the city.

Losing Lyman, a key staging ground for Moscow’s campaign in the northern Donetsk region, is a blow to the Russian president, who claimed the area and three other Ukrainian provinces as Russian territory on Friday.

Its capture is crucial for Ukraine’s counter-offensive, which has swept from west to east with the aim of cutting the north-south supply lines that sustain Russia’s campaign in the Donbas region, which is comprised of Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk.

The Ukraine military said in a tweet on Saturday that its air assault forces “are entering Lyman”.

“The Ukrainian army has and will always have the decisive vote in today’s and any future ‘referendums’,” it added, referring to the Russian stage-managed secession votes in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia which Kyiv and its western allies have vowed never to recognise.

It is unclear how many of the Russian troops stationed in Lyman pulled back as the Ukrainian military encircled the city — their only exit route east was within Ukrainian artillery range in the last few days. As of Friday an estimated 5,500 Russian soldiers were in Lyman. 

Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine’s troops had a “significant advantage in forces and resources” that enabled them to lead the assault on Lyman.

Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian-appointed governor of Luhansk province, said that Ukrainian troops had completed the encirclement of Lyman and that 5,000 Russian troops were trapped there. The claims cannot be independently verified.

Ukrainian social media has been flooded with images of captured Russian soldiers.

Soldiers hung up Ukrainian flags at the entrance to the city, according to images shared on social media, and by Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russian forces had three options, Haidai wrote on his Telegram channel: “To escape, to die together, or to surrender. The possibilities of delivering ammunition to the Russians to the surrounded city or a peaceful exit from the settlement are already blocked.”

The potential capture or negotiated surrender of such a large number of Russian soldiers is a major setback for Putin. Such a large number of Russian prisoners of war would also change the calculus in the future for carefully negotiated personnel swaps that have seen hundreds of Ukrainian captives freed in the last months, a Western diplomat said.

The “Russian grouping” in Lyman had been completely surrounded, Ukrainian army spokesman Serhii Cherevatyi said on television. “The operation is not over yet — they have a lot of killed and wounded,” he said.

The encirclement of the Russian soldiers and the fall of Lyman, which had a prewar population of about 20,000, prompted dismay among pro-Kremlin bloggers on social media — and blistering criticism from one important Russian commander.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, said Russia’s defence ministry had left troops in the area without adequate communications equipment, support and supplies.

“How can you command units properly when you are 150km away? We abandoned several towns and a large amount of territory because we didn’t have elementary military logistics,” Kadyrov wrote on social media app Telegram.

He called on Putin to retaliate by escalating even further against Ukraine.

“We need to take more fundamental steps including declaring martial law in the border regions and using low-yield nuclear weapons,” Kadyrov said.

Zakhar Prilepin, a novelist who leads a political party in Russia’s parliament, wrote: “Ukraine’s armed forces are entering Lyman. Our city. Our Russian city [ . . . ] Every loss is the commander-in-chief’s personal loss.”

North of Lyman, Russian forces struck an evacuation convoy in the Kharkiv district, killing at least 20 civilians, according to the regional governor Oleh Syniehubov. Russian forces abandoned that region in the face of Ukraine’s rapid counter-offensive last month, but locals have said they still face intermittent artillery attacks.

It was the second strike on civilian convoys that Ukrainian officials have blamed on Russia this week; a missile strike in Zaporizhzhia killed at least 30 people yesterday.

Local officials said Russian missiles had struck a group of vehicles heading into Russian-occupied territory, where they intended to bring out relatives.

Russia has not commented on either of the attacks but claimed it killed 60 Ukrainian servicemen and destroyed 10 pieces of military hardware in a strike near Zaporizhzhia.

Separately, Italy’s main oil and gas company ENI said on Saturday that Russia’s Gazprom had cut the remaining gas supplies to the country, which had fallen to about 10 per cent of the country’s total from 40 per cent before the invasion. 

Eni said Gazprom had blamed shipping problems through Austria but a spokesperson told Reuters there were no signs of problems at the Slovakian-Austrian gas entry point, where Russian supplies arrive through Ukraine. 

Italy said on Friday that its navy would increase measures to protect gas pipelines from north Africa to Europe through the Sicilian channel, warning that it feared Russia could try to target key energy infrastructure following the alleged sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic this week. 

Gazprom said it had stopped shipping gas through Austria because the country’s pipeline operator had not confirmed the amount of gas to be transported. It blamed the issue on regulatory changes in Austria and said it was “working on the problem together with Italian buyers”.

Additional reporting by David Sheppard