Ukraine said Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fighting was taking a \"terrifying\" toll as casualties soar.<\/p>\n
With Russia's 16-week war of attrition pushing Ukrainian resistance to the limit, Kyiv has reiterated its plea for Western nations to provide additional arms to help it contain Moscow's aggression.<\/p>\n
The twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk have been targeted for weeks as the last areas still under Ukrainian control in the eastern Lugansk region.<\/p>\n
Regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said Monday Russian forces control 70 to 80 percent of Severodonetsk but had not captured or encircled it.<\/p>\n
\"They destroyed all the bridges, and getting into the city is no longer possible. Evacuation is also not possible,\" he told Radio Free Europe.<\/p>\n
Zelensky, in his daily address to the Ukrainian people, said \"the human cost of this battle is very high for us. It is simply terrifying.\"<\/p>\n
Last week in a rare disclosure of casualty figures, Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said up to 100 of his troops were dying daily and 500 sustaining injuries -- a rise from the 60-100 Ukrainian soldiers Zelensky estimated on June 1 that were dying daily.<\/p>\n
Now, with a ring tightening on the Lugansk region, Ukrainian forces in the area had two choices, \"to surrender or die\", said Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists.<\/p>\n
The capture of Severodonetsk would open the road to Sloviansk and another major city, Kramatorsk, in Moscow's push to conquer Donbas, a mainly Russian-speaking region partly held by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian forces were fighting for \"every town and village where the occupiers came\", Zelensky said on Monday in a message to mark the eighth anniversary of the liberation of Mariupol in the earlier conflict.<\/p>\n
In May, Russian troops captured the port city in southern Ukraine after a weeks-long siege.<\/p>\n
\"We are once again fighting for it and all of Ukraine,\" Zelensky said.<\/p>\n
- 'War crimes' -<\/p>\n
On Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying that attacks on the northeastern city of Kharkiv -- many using banned cluster bombs -- had killed hundreds of civilians.<\/p>\n
\"The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,\" the rights group said in a report on Ukraine's second-biggest city.<\/p>\n
In Bucha, a town near Kyiv synonymous with war crimes allegations, local police said they had discovered another seven bodies in a grave.<\/p>\n
\"Several victims had their hands tied and knees bound,\" Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov said on Facebook.<\/p>\n
Dozens of bodies in civilian clothing were found in the town in April after Russian troops withdrew from the area following a month-long occupation.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in northern Ukraine on Monday, Russian rocket strikes hit the town of Pryluky, local authorities said.<\/p>\n
Pryluky, which lies about 150 kilometres (90 miles) east of the capital, is home to a military airfield.<\/p>\n
In Lysychansk, Russian bombardments killed three civilians in the last 24 hours, including a six-year-old boy, Lugansk governor Gaiday said.<\/p>\n
Separatist authorities in the city of Donetsk said three people were killed and four wounded in Ukrainian shelling on a market.<\/p>\n
- Weapons call -<\/p>\n
Russia's invasion of its neighbour has prompted Finland and Sweden to give up decades of military non-alignment and seek to join the NATO alliance.<\/p>\n
In terms of security, Sweden is \"in a better place now than before it applied\", NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Monday, even though its application is in limbo with Turkey currently withholding its approval.<\/p>\n
Stoltenberg said NATO was working \"hard and actively\" to resolve Ankara's concerns \"as soon as possible\" ahead of a June 15 meeting.<\/p>\n
It was at the Brussels summit that Kyiv said Monday it was hoping for a decision on further Western arms deliveries to support its war effort.<\/p>\n
\"Being straightforward -- to end the war we need heavy weapons,\" Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak said on Twitter.<\/p>\n
Podolyak listed items he said the Ukrainian army requires, including hundreds of howitzers, tanks and armoured vehicles.<\/p>\n
- Harvest delayed -<\/p>\n
Far from the war, World Trade Organization members were gathering in Geneva to address the threat posed to global food security by Russia's invasion.<\/p>\n
Ukraine's deputy agriculture minister on Monday said a quarter of his country's arable land had been lost but insisted national food security was not threatened.<\/p>\n
On a farm near the southern Ukrainian city Mykolaiv, the harvest has been delayed by the need to undo damage by Russian troops who passed through the area in March.<\/p>\n
\"We planted really late because we needed to clear everything beforehand,\" including bombshells, Nadiia Ivanova, 42, told AFP.<\/p>\n
The farm's warehouses currently hold 2,000 tonnes of last season's grain but there are no takers.<\/p>\n
The railways have been partially destroyed by the Russian army, while any ship that sails faces the threat of being sunk.<\/p>\n
burs-sea\/imm\/mlm<\/p>\n
Meta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ukraine said Monday its forces had been pushed back from the centre of key industrial city Severodonetsk, where President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fighting was taking a \"terrifying\" toll as casualties soar. With Russia's 16-week war of attrition pushing Ukrainian resistance to the limit, Kyiv has reiterated its plea for Western nations to provide additional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553,1],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-93592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed","category-non-classifiee"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n