Russia has seized full control of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, more than three years after President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion in February 2022, the region’s Russian-backed leader told state television.
Luhansk, which has an area of 26,700 square km (10,308 square miles), is the first Ukrainian region to fall fully under the established control of Russian forces since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Putin, in September 2022, declared that Luhansk – along with the partially controlled Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions – was being incorporated into Russia, a step Western European states said was illegal and that most of the world did not recognise.
Luhansk ‘Fully Liberated’
“The territory of the Luhansk People’s Republic is fully liberated – 100%,” Leonid Pasechnik, who was born in Soviet Ukraine and is now a Russian-installed official cast by Moscow as the head of the “Luhansk People’s Republic”, told Russian state television.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Russian defence ministry or comment from Ukraine.
Ukraine says that Russia’s claims to Luhansk and other areas of what is internationally recognised to be Ukraine are groundless and illegal, and Kyiv has promised never to recognise Russian sovereignty over the areas.
Russia says the territories are now part of Russia, fall under its nuclear umbrella and will never be returned.
Luhansk was once part of the Russian Empire but changed hands after the Russian Revolution. It was taken by the Red Army in 1920 and then became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 as part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Along with neighbouring Donetsk, Luhansk was the crucible of the conflict, which began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces in both Luhansk and Donetsk.
Russia controls nearly 19% of what is internationally recognised to be Ukraine, including Luhansk, plus over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Russian Advances Toward Sumy
Russian forces have pushed to within 12 miles of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, significantly escalating military activity near the regional capital, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
Following the withdrawal of Ukrainian units from Russia’s Kursk region in late April, Russian troops crossed into Ukraine and have since massed around 50,000 soldiers in the area, according to the report.
Ukrainian soldiers told WSJ that Russian forces now outnumber them by a ratio of three to one.
In response, Ukraine has deployed its elite “Timur” Special Forces Unit near Sumy in a bid to slow the Russian advance.
Battle For Dnipropetrovsk
Russia’s forces have captured their first village in Ukraine’s east-central Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian state media and military bloggers reported on Monday, following Moscow’s seizure of 950 square kilometres of territory over the past two months.
As Moscow and Kyiv talk of possible peace, the war has intensified with Russian forces carving out a 200 square kilometre (77.22 square miles) chunk of Ukraine’s Sumy region and entering the Dnipropetrovsk region last month.
The authoritative Ukrainian Deep State map shows that Russia now controls 113,588 square kms of Ukrainian territory, up 943 square km over the two months to June 28.
Russia’s state RIA news agency quoted a pro-Russian official, Vladimir Rogov, as saying that Russian forces had taken control of the village of Dachnoye just inside the Dnipropetrovsk region.
However, the Ukrainian military on Monday denied the reports that Russian troops had entered Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, according to The Kyiv Independent.
(With inputs from Reuters and IBNS)
