September 7, 2024
LYMAN, Ukraine (AP) — The bodies of Russian soldiers lying in the streets of a key eastern Ukrainian city on Tuesday are evidence of a hasty retreat that marked a new military defeat for Moscow as it struggles to hang on to areas it illegally annexed last week.
Russia’s upper house of parliament rubber-stamped the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on Tuesday, following “referendums” that Ukraine and its Western allies dismissed as illegal and fraudulent.
Responding to the annexation move, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has formally ruled out talks with Russia. Zelenskyy’s decree released Tuesday declares that holding negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin has become impossible after his decision to take over the four regions of Ukraine.
The Kremlin responded to the Ukrainian president's decree by saying that it will wait for Ukraine to agree to sit down for talks on ending the conflict, noting that it may not happen until a new Ukrainian president takes office.
“We will wait for the incumbent president to change his position or wait for a future Ukrainian president who would revise his stand in the interests of the Ukrainian people,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Despite the Kremlin's apparent political bravado, the picture on the ground underscored the disarray Putin faces in his response to Ukrainian advances and attempts to establish new Russian borders.
Over the weekend, Russian troops pulled back from Lyman, a strategic eastern city that the Russians had used as a key logistics and transport hub, to avoid being encircled by Ukrainian forces. The city's liberation gave Ukraine a key vantage point for pressing its offensive deeper into Russian-held territories.
Two days later, an Associated Press team reporting from the town saw at least 18 bodies of Russian soldiers still on the ground. The Ukrainian military appeared to have collected the bodies of their comrades after fierce battles for control of Lyman, but didn't immediately remove those of the Russians.
“We fight for our land, for our children, so that our people can live better, but all this comes at a very high price,” said a Ukrainian soldier who goes by the nom de guerre Rud.
Lyman residents emerged from basements where they had hidden during the battle for control of the city and built bonfires for cooking. The city has had no water, electricity or gas since May. Residential buildings were burned. A few residents emerged on bicycles.
An 85-year-old woman recalled a recent explosion nearby. “I was standing in the hall, about five meters away, when it boomed," she said. "God forbid, now I can’t hear well.”
After reclaiming control of Lyman in the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian forces pushed further east and may have gone as far as the border of the neighboring Luhansk region as they advance toward Kreminna, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in its latest analysis of the combat situation.
The Ukrainian successes in the east and the south came even as Russia moved to absorb four Ukrainian regions amid the fighting there.
The upper house of Russian parliament, the Federation Council, voted Tuesday to ratify treaties to make the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions part of Russia. The lower house did it on Monday.
Putin is expected to quickly endorse the annexation treaties.
Russia’s moves to incorporate the Ukrainian regions have been done so hastily that even the exact borders of the territories being absorbed were unclear.
