Russian forces in Ukraine will focus on trying to seize all of the Donetsk region, having forced Ukrainian troops to withdraw from the last major city under their control in the neighboring Luhansk region, a local governor said on Monday.
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After abandoning an assault on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, during the early weeks of the war, Russia concentrated its military operation on the industrial Donbas heartland that comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine since 2014.
Moscow said it had established full control over the Luhansk region after Ukrainian forces pulled out of the bombed-out city of Lysychansk.
"In terms of the military, it is bad to leave positions, but there is nothing critical [in the loss of Lysychansk]," Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai told Reuters. "It hurts a lot, but it's not losing the war."
Gaidai said the withdrawal from Lysychansk had been "centralized", indicating that it was planned and orderly, but that Ukrainian forces had risked being surrounded.
"Still, for them [Russian forces] the number one goal is the Donetsk region," he said, adding that the city of Sloviansk and the town of Bakhmut were expected to come under attack in particular as Russia tries to take full control of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin said the capture of Lysychansk less than a week after taking neighboring Sievierdonetsk meant it had "liberated" Luhansk, a major war goal.
It also said it would give the captured territory to the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Luhansk People's Republic whose independence it recognized on the eve of the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday night vowed to regain the lost territory with the help of long-range Western weapons.
He said Russia was concentrating its firepower on the Donbas front, but Ukraine would hit back with long-range weapons such as the US-supplied HIMARS rocket launchers.
"The fact that we protect the lives of our soldiers, our people, plays an equally important role. We will rebuild the walls, we will win back the land, and people must be protected above all else," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
The US announced on Friday that it will provide Ukraine with $820 million in new military aid, including new surface-to-air missile systems and counter-artillery radars in order to respond to Russia's heavy reliance on long-range strikes in the war.
"We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes," President Joe Biden said at a press conference during the NATO summit in Madrid. He argued that Russia had already suffered a blow to its international standing and major damage to its economy from Western sanctions imposed over the invasion.
The US is giving Ukrainians "the capacity" so that "they can continue to resist the Russian aggression," Biden said. "And so I don't know how it's going to end, but it will not end with a Russian defeat of Ukraine in Ukraine."
Much of the aid formally announced Friday will take weeks or months to reach Ukraine.
As part of the new package, the US will purchase two systems known as NASAMS, a Norwegian-developed anti-aircraft system that is used to protect the airspace around the White House and Capitol in Washington. A senior defense official told reporters the NASAMS are intended to help Ukraine transition away from using Soviet-era air defense systems that besides being well known to the Russians have to be repaired with spare parts that are hard to procure. The official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss military assessments.
The Pentagon will also provide the Ukrainians with up to 150,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition. Given the high usage of artillery on both sides, it's unclear how long those new rounds would last. The official declined to say how many estimated rounds Ukraine and Russia are firing daily.
And the Pentagon will also buy four counter-artillery radars for Ukraine. Those new purchases, funded by the Pentagon's Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, require weeks at a minimum for defense companies to build. Ukrainians are also being trained to use the newly provided systems.
The Pentagon will also provide additional ammunition for medium-range rocket systems it provided Ukraine in June, known as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. The ammunition will come from the Defense Department's own inventory under what's known as drawdown authority and will be made available to Ukraine more quickly.
This is the 14th package of military weapons and equipment transferred to Ukraine from Defense Department stocks since August 2021.
Meanwhile, in Sloviansk, west of Lysychansk in the Donetsk region, Mayor Vadym Lyakh wrote on Facebook that on Sunday fierce shelling had killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl.
Zelenskyy's office said Russian artillery strikes hit residential and farm buildings in the Kharkiv region.
Russia's Defense Ministry also said on Sunday it had struck the military infrastructure of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city in the northeast.
About 70 km (44 miles) from Kharkiv on the Russian side of the border, Moscow also reported explosions on Sunday in Belgorod, which it said killed at least three people and destroyed homes.
"The sound was so strong that I jumped up, I woke up, got very scared, and started screaming," a Belgorod resident told Reuters, adding the blasts occurred around at night.
Moscow has accused Kyiv of numerous attacks on Belgorod and other areas bordering Ukraine. Kyiv has never claimed responsibility for any of these incidents.
Ukraine said its air force had flown some 15 sorties "in virtually all directions of hostilities", destroying equipment and two ammunition depots.
In the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol, Ukrainian forces hit a military logistics base with more than 30 strikes on Sunday, the city's exiled mayor Ivan Fedorov said. A Russian-installed official confirmed that strikes had hit the city.
Meanwhile, two Russian airplanes departed Bulgaria on Sunday with scores of Russian diplomatic staff and their families amid a mass expulsion that has sent tensions soaring between the historically close nations, a Russian diplomat said.
Filip Voskresenski, a high-ranking Russian diplomat, told journalists at the airport in Bulgaria's capital Sofia before the flights left that he was among the 70 Russian diplomatic staff declared "persona non grata" last week and ordered to leave the country by the end of Sunday.
Bulgaria's expulsion decision was announced by acting Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, who took a strong stance against Russia after it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Petkov, who lost a no-confidence vote on June 22, has claimed Moscow used "hybrid war" tactics to bring down his government.
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Petkov has said that Russia will retain 43 of its employees after the expulsion and noted that Bulgaria has just 12 diplomatic staff in Moscow.
"Anyone who works against the interests of Bulgaria will be called to go back to the country from which they came," he said.
On Friday, Russian Ambassador Eleonora Mitrofanova issued Bulgaria an ultimatum to reverse its decision and threatened that Moscow would fully sever diplomatic ties.
"I intend to urgently raise before the leadership of my country the issue of the closure of the Embassy of Russia in Bulgaria, which will inevitably lead to the closure of the Bulgarian diplomatic mission in Moscow," she said in a statement.
The expulsion, which has severely strained diplomatic ties, is the greatest ever number of Russian diplomats expelled by Bulgaria, which has European Union and NATO membership. Bulgaria has strongly backed the West's sanctions against Moscow since it launched its war on Ukraine more than four months ago.
The European Union, which Bulgaria has been a member of since 2007, responded to Russia's "unjustified threat" and said it "stands in full support and solidarity with Bulgaria."
In late April, Russia cut off gas supplies to Bulgaria after officials refused a Moscow demand to pay gas bills in rubles, Russia's currency. Bulgaria's defense minister was also ousted in early March for referring to Russia's war as a "special military operation," the Kremlin-preferred description.
