LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — With Russia about to encircle Sievierodonetsk, a city critical to its goal of seizing Ukraine’s east, and with a neighboring city squarely in Moscow’s sights, the question of how realities on the ground will shape the next phase of the war became still more pressing Sunday for Ukraine’s Western allies.
“The Russians are making every effort to cut off Sievierodonetsk,” the regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, said Sunday on Telegram, the messaging app. “The next two or three days will be significant.”
Across the river, Ukrainians trying to hold fast against the Russians in Lysychansk had the advantage of good terrain — but dwindling weaponry to defend it with.
“If there is no help with military equipment, of course they will drive us out,” said Oleksandr Voronenko, 46, a military police officer stationed in Lysychansk. “Because everyday the equipment is destroyed. You have to replace it with something new.”
Ukrainian officials have been imploring NATO allies for faster delivery of longer-range weapons, and the urgently needed replenishment of still more basic supplies, including ammunition.
But with the momentum of the war shifting more decisively in Russia’s favor, Ukraine’s allies, their economies threatened and their resolve tested, may soon find themselves forced to confront far more fundamental questions than what sort of weapons to provide, including whether to put pressure on Ukraine to reach a peace agreement with Russia or risk Russian escalation with more aggressive military support.
“There was always a sense that, when the center of gravity shifted to the south and east, there would be the potential for greater Russian gains based on greater mass and their existing territorial acquisitions,” said Ian Lesser, a former American official who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund.
“But it does raise more serious longer-term questions about the nature of the conflict, Ukraine’s aims and Western aims in relation to those,” he said.
As Ukrainians wait, they are suffering horrific losses in the Donbas region where the fight for Sievierodonetsk is playing out. By Ukraine’s own assessment, it is losing between 100 and 200 people a day as the bloodshed there worsens, in part because of Russian material superiority and in part because of Ukraine’s determination to fight on despite the increasingly bleak picture in the east.
Those Western supplies that have made it through to the front line are neither as plentiful or as sophisticated as Ukraine would like. And some never even make it into battle, hit by Russian strikes before they can even be deployed.
Late Saturday, Russian missiles hit a military warehouse in western Ukraine, wounding nearly two dozen people, and, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry, destroying antitank and antiaircraft missile systems supplied to Ukraine by the United States and the European Union.
The Ukrainian government has poured troops and resources into its effort to hold on to Sievierodonetsk, a strategically important industrial city and the last major urban center in the Donbas region of Luhansk that has not yet fallen. Russian forces have destroyed two bridges leading to the center of Sievierodonetsk and were shelling the remaining one, an important supply line for Ukrainian forces, the regional governor said.
Now, the battle may be about to shift to its sister city, Lysychansk.
On Sunday, from atop a hill in Lysychansk, it was evident why the soon to be focal point of the Russian offensive appears easier to defend than other parts of Donbas: It is on high ground. The sprawling plains of the region are rich in natural…