Ukrainian official warns of ‘catastrophe’ in captured city of Severodonetsk

A Ukrainian regional official warned Friday of deteriorating living conditions in a city captured by Russian forces two weeks ago, saying Severodonetsk is without water, power or a working sewage system while the bodies of the dead decompose in hot apartment buildings.

Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, said the Russians were unleashing indiscriminate artillery barrages as they try to secure their gains in Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. Moscow this week claimed full control of the province, but Haidai and other Ukrainian officials said their troops retained a small part of it.

“Luhansk hasn’t been fully captured even though the Russians have engaged all their arsenal to achieve that goal,” Haidai told the Associated Press. “Fierce battles are going on in several villages on the region’s border. The Russians are relying on tanks and artillery to advance, leaving scorched earth.”

Russia’s forces “strike every building that they think could be a fortified position,” he said. “They aren’t stopped by the fact that civilians are left there and they die in their homes and courtyards. They keep firing.”

Occupied Severodonetsk, meanwhile, “is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe,” the governor wrote on social media. “The Russians have completely destroyed all the critical infrastructure, and they are unable to repair anything.”

Haidai reported last week that about 8,000 residents remained in the city, which had a prewar population of around 100,000. Some Ukrainian officials and soldiers said Russian forces leveled Severodonetsk, Luhansk’s administrative center, before Ukrainian troops were ordered out of the city late last month to avoid their encirclement and capture.

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Luhansk is one of two provinces that make up the Donbas, a region of mines and factories where pro-Moscow separatists have fought Ukraine’s army for eight years and declared independent republics that Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized before he sent troops into Ukraine.

After asserting full control of Luhansk, Putin said Russian forces would have a chance to rest and recoup, but other parts of eastern Ukraine have come under sustained bombardment. The Russian leader warned Kyiv that it should quickly accept Moscow’s terms or brace for the worst.

“Everybody should know that, largely speaking, we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest,” Putin said while speaking with leaders of the Kremlin-controlled parliament Thursday.

Ukraine’s presidential office said Friday that at least 12 civilians were killed and another 30 wounded by Russian shelling over the last 24 hours. Two cities in Donetsk — the other Donbas province — experienced the heaviest barrage, with six people killed and 21 wounded.

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In northeast Ukraine, another four people were killed and nine were wounded in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, where Russian shelling hit residential areas.

Commenting on Putin’s ominous statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russian leader was reacting to statements by Ukraine’s government and its Western allies about defeating Russia on the battlefield.

“Russia’s potential is so big that just a small part of it has been used in the special military operation,” Peskov told reporters. “And so Western statements are utterly absurd and just add to the grief of the Ukrainian people.”

The British Defense Ministry said Ukrainian forces had made advances near the Russian-occupied southern city of Kherson. The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian partisans blew up a railroad bridge some 15 miles north of Melitopol, which is to the east of Kherson, on Thursday to disrupt Russian resupply operations.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Parliament overwhelmingly approved Sweden and Finland’s requests to join NATO. German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said the two countries’ accession would greatly strengthen NATO’s northern and eastern flanks, noting their strong naval forces in the Baltic Sea and their land forces that know the region bordering Russia well.

Lambrecht suggested that Putin’s efforts to divide and destroy NATO had failed. “He bet on our weakness,” she said. “Now he gets the opposite.”

All 30 member countries must agree before the Western military alliance can admit the new applicants.

And in Moscow, a court sentenced a Russian municipal council member who had publicly criticized the war to seven years in prison on charges of spreading “knowingly false information” about the Russian military.

Alexei Gorinov, 60, criticized Russia’s military actions in Ukraine at a March meeting. A legal aid group said he is the first person ordered to serve prison time under a law that makes it illegal to disparage the Russian military. Russia’s parliament rubber-stamped the law, which carries a maximum prison term of 15 years, a week after the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine.