Lviv/Kyiv - Russia launched an all-out assault on east Ukraine on Tuesday, Ukraine describing the assault as the Battle of the Donbas, aa operation to seize two provinces and claim a battlefield victory.
Ukrainian officials are insisting that their troops would withstand the new assault, which began overnight with massive Russian artillery and rocket barrages and attempts to advance across almost the entire stretch of the eastern front.
Ukraine said the Russians had seized Kreminna, a frontline town of 18,000 people in Luhansk, one of the two Donbas provinces.
It would also effectively slice Ukraine in two and deprive it of the main industrial assets concentrated in the east, including coal mines, metals plants and machine-building factories.
European and American arms have been key to bolstering Ukraine’s defense, helping the country to hold off the Russian force. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday by phone that the Netherlands would send “heavier material” to Ukraine, including armored vehicles.
In what appeared to be an intensification of attacks, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that air-launched missiles destroyed 13 Ukrainian troop and weapons locations while the air force struck 60 other Ukrainian military facilities, including missile warhead storage depots. Russian artillery hit 1,260 Ukrainian military facilities and 1,214 troops concentrations over the last 24 hours. The claims could not be independently verified.
Retired British Gen. Richard Barrons told the BBC that “in this particular battle the Russians will be approaching the Ukrainians from the east, but also from the north and the south to try and get behind them, and so this is a more complex military problem for the Ukrainians.”
Shelling continued in Mariupol with Russia issuing a fresh ultimatum Tuesday to the Ukrainian troops holed up there to surrender, saying those who come out will “keep their lives.” The Ukrainians have ignored previous such offers.
Securing Mariupol would free Russian troops up to move elsewhere in the Donbas, deprive Ukraine of a vital port, and complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, seized from Ukraine from 2014.
Denys Prokopenko, commander of the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard that is guarding the last known Ukrainian pocket of resistance in Mariupol, said in a video message that Russia had begun dropping bunker-buster bombs on the Azovstal steel plant where the regiment was holding out.
Civilians are also believed to be sheltering at the plant, which covers the territory of about 11 square kilometers (over 4 square miles).
-Reuters/AP