Ukraine’s armed forces are battling for control of a string of towns in the Donbas region, as Kyiv’s counteroffensive pushes east against Russian troops.
Serhiy Hayday, the exiled Ukrainian head of the Luhansk region, said on Tuesday that fierce battles were under way in Lyman, a town east of Izyum, a major military command post from which Russian forces fled from days earlier.
The region — stretching from Izyum to northern parts of the Luhansk region — had been used by Russia for months as a staging area for its push to capture the last corner of Donbas not yet under Russian control. If Kyiv retakes the area, it would make it all but impossible for Russia to encircle Ukrainian forces in the region.