KYIV —
Russian forces have seized control of half of
eastern Ukraine’s key city of Severodonetsk, a senior official said Tuesday,
hours after EU leaders struck a watered-down deal to ban more than two-thirds
of Moscow’s oil imports.
اضافة اعلان
In central Ukraine, two
Russian soldiers were
sentenced to more than 11 years in jail each after a court found them guilty of
firing artillery at civilian areas soon after Moscow’s February 24 invasion.
Severodonetsk is one of several industrial hubs that
lie on Russia’s path to capturing the Donbas’s Lugansk region, where Moscow has
shifted the bulk of its firepower since failing to capture Kyiv in the war’s early
stages.
“Unfortunately, the front line divides the city in
half. But the city is still defending itself, the city is still Ukrainian, our
soldiers are defending it,” said Oleksandr Stryuk, head of Severodonetsk’s
military and civil administration.
Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday earlier
described the situation as “extremely complicated”, conceding that parts of the
city were controlled by Russian forces.
But as Russian troops edged closer to the
Severodonetsk city center, EU leaders at a summit in Brussels were tightening
the economic screws on Moscow.
A compromise oil embargo deal reached late Monday,
meant to punish Russia for its invasion, cuts “a huge source of financing for
its war machine,” European Council chief
Charles Michel tweeted.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the
key figures who blocked an agreement by the 27-nation bloc, hailed the deal for
preserving Budapest’s supply of cheap crude from Moscow.
“Families can sleep peacefully tonight, we kept out
the most hair-raising idea,” Orban, whose country borders war-torn Ukraine to
the west, said in a video message.
‘Save your lives’
Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky had urged Europe to forge their “independence” from Russian
energy.
The situation on the eastern front line in Donbas
has become increasingly desperate, with Ukrainian towns facing near constant
shelling by Russian forces.
“We see some cars driving around with Ukrainian
flags so we figure that means we are still part of Ukraine,” said Yevgen
Onyshchenko, a 42-year-old plumber in a powerless apartment in Severodonetsk’s
twin city Lysychansk.
“But otherwise, we are in the dark.”
A French journalist, Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff, was
killed while covering civilian evacuations in the area on Monday.
An overnight rocket attack killed at least three
people and wounded six in the city of Slovyansk, Donetsk regional governor
Pavlo Kirilenko said Tuesday on Telegram.
“I repeat once again that there are no safe places
in the Donetsk region, so I call again: evacuate — save your lives,” he said.
In the southern region of Kherson, the country’s
military leadership said Ukrainian forces have pushed back, as prosecutors
pressed ahead with prosecutions of captured Russian soldiers.
The servicemen convicted on Tuesday — Alexander
Bobykin and Alexander Ivanov — were both handed sentences of 11 years and six
months for firing Grad missiles on two villages in the north-eastern Kharkiv
region in the early days of the war.
The verdict after the trial in the Poltava region
comes one week after another court, in the capital Kyiv, gave a 21-year-old
Russian solider a life sentence — the country’s first judicial reckoning on
Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general was in The Hague on
Tuesday meeting her counterpart from the International Criminal Court and other
officials as they seek wider war crimes prosecutions.
But while Ukraine is pushing for solidarity from its
allies, European leaders meeting on Tuesday for a second day played down the
chances of a rapid embargo on Russian gas to follow the partial ban on oil
imports.
‘Sit in the trench’
Michel said the sanctions
involved disconnecting Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, from the global
SWIFT system, banning three state broadcasters and blacklisting individuals blamed
for war crimes.
Russia’s Gazprom, meanwhile, turned off the tap to
the Netherlands on Tuesday, halting gas shipments after Dutch energy firm
GasTerra ignored a demand that gas supplied from April 1 be paid for in rubles.
Danish energy company Orsted has also warned its gas
shipments could be cut off when a Tuesday payment deadline had passed.
Washington, however, is taking a cautious line
regarding weaponry for Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden said Monday he would not send long-range rocket systems that could hit Russian
territory, despite urgent requests from Kyiv for exactly that.
Ukraine has received extensive US military aid, with
legislators approving another $40 billion assistance package in May.
But front-line Ukrainian soldiers getting pummeled
by rocket and artillery fire said without long-range weapons to hit the
Russians, it was not enough.
“If you know you have a heavy weapon behind you,
everyone’s spirits rise,” one soldier who uses the nom de guerre Luzhniy told
AFP.
“Otherwise, you just sit in the trench staring at
the horizon.
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