A surprising success achieved a few days ago in the recapture of Sievjerodonetsk in the Donbass is apparently no longer tenable. The withdrawal via the Donetsk raft is likely to take place soon.
The Ukrainian counterattack, in which surprisingly large parts of Sievjerodonetsk at the eastern tip of the Ukrainian frontal salient in the Donbass were recaptured over the weekend, is likely to have failed: the regional governor reported on Wednesday that the forces were on the ground because of heavy Russian bombing and their great superiority fell back again and only held the outskirts of the city and a strip of land along the Donets.
It was useless to withstand the shelling, it said. It may soon be possible to move across the river to the sister city of Lyssychansk – observers had long expected something like this as a tactical measure.
On Friday, the British military had forecast a partial Russian victory in the east of the front salient within 14 days, including the fall of Lysychansk. Russian troops have also been slowly driving a wedge in the rear of the defenders in the area from the south for several weeks, including a mechanized brigade, Carpathian mountain troops and elements of the Ukrainian Legion, a force recruited from abroad. They are threatened with encirclement, currently only a passage to the west, barely 20 kilometers wide, is open. Then the Ukrainian region of Luhansk would be completely conquered and another thrust west into the rest of the Donetsk region could be expected, a little more than half of which is currently under Russian control.
Moscow’s chief rabbi fled
Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, meanwhile, reportedly left Russia on Wednesday, back in March and with his wife; The destination was Hungary, now Israel. Goldschmidt (58), a native of Switzerland with ancestors in France and Austria, was previously pressured to support the attack, it said. He has been a rabbi in Moscow for 33 years and is currently President of the Conference of European Rabbis.
(ag./wg)