Governor says Russia controls ‘most’ of Ukraine’s Severodonetsk, city is destroyed

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces now control “most” of eastern Ukraine’s Severodonetsk, the scene of fierce battles for days as the Russian army tries to seize it, the local governor said Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, today, Russian troops control most of the city,” the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiy Gaiday, said in a video. He said “90 percent” of the city was destroyed.

He said there was now “no possibility to leave Severodonetsk.”

Gaiday also said the Russian bombardment has caused a leak of toxic nitric acid from an industrial facility. He said a Russian airstrike on Severodonetsk hit a tank with nitric acid at a chemical factory, causing a massive leak of its fumes.

Gaiday posted a picture of a huge rose cloud hanging over the city and urged residents not to leave their homes and wear gas masks or make improvised masks from fabric soaked in soda solution.

Moscow’s forces appeared to be advancing in their goal of seizing the key city, with Gaiday several hours earlier saying they controlled “half” of it.

He nonetheless said that Kyiv’s army still “holds the defenses in their current positions.” He added that the Ukrainian military was not in danger of being “surrounded.”

“The fear that our military will be surrounded somewhere… It will not happen,” he said, adding that the soldiers were “constantly communicating” with Ukrainian authorities.

An evacuation bus had to stop its mission from taking people out of Severodonetsk Monday after a French journalist traveling with it was killed by Russian shelling.

Meanwhile, Sloviansk, in the eastern Donetsk region, is again in Russia’s sights as part of its efforts to seize the Donbas, made up of Donetsk and the neighboring Luhansk region.

Russian military officials have said their main goal is to “liberate” Donbas, the predominantly Russian-speaking industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014.

“I was on my sofa and suddenly my sofa just jumped in the air,” said Mikhaylo Samoluk, one of the local residents. The strike came around 1:30 in the morning, he said, when those still living in the building were asleep.

Olena Voytenko, who lives on the first floor of one of the apartment blocks, said most of the residents had already moved away, but around 30 people still lived there.

“Why do they bomb the residential buildings? Isn’t there military honor for Russians that they can fight in the field?” questioned Voytenko, who is of Russian origin herself. “Why do you annihilate the country that you try to conquer? I do not see any sense in it.”

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s General Staff said an attempt to storm a village lying between currently Russian-held Izyum and Sloviansk was repelled, and that Russian forces were “creating conditions for [a] further offensive” in the area.

Many have fled Sloviansk, as others have from many cities and towns in eastern Ukraine. Some people stayed.

Among them are Lydmyla Telehyna and her husband Mykola. Both in their 70s, they stayed behind after their daughter and her four young children left Ukraine because of the war.

They went to check on their daughter’s apartment on the top floor of the building, and were horrified by what they saw.

The windows had shattered, shards of glass lying throughout the front room where the children would have slept, and the walls were marked with shrapnel.

“What have they done?” Telehyna cried, her grief mingled with the relief of her daughter and grandchildren already having fled the country.

Authorities have repeatedly urged residents to leave the areas of eastern Ukraine near the fighting.

“All the territory of Donetsk region now is a field of war,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk administration, said in a statement on the Sloviansk rocket attack posted on his Facebook page. “Every such blow is a cruel reminder that there are no safe places in the Donetsk region now. Evacuate! Evacuation saves lives!”

But some are unable, or unwilling, to move despite the dangers.

“There is no place to go,” said Samoluk. Besides, he said, he didn’t want to leave. “I didn’t leave in 2014, and I won’t go now.”