Ukrainian troops held their positions on Friday, May 27, in a day of heavy fighting across the Donbas sector, news agencies and official an statement said.
Oleksandr Stryuk, head of the Severodonetsk city defense command, in a public statement confirmed that Russian Federation (RF) forces had broken into the Mir Hotel on the northern outskirts of the town, and said fierce battles were in progress near the city bus station. UAF defenses generally were holding, he said.
Severodonetsk is one of the main objectives of the RF’s Donbas’ offensive, launched more than a month ago. RF units have used artillery and air strikes to fight forward slowly, frequently leveling homes and businesses.
Since May 24 RF forces have threatened a key road used for supply connecting Severodonetsk and the UAF supply hub in the sector, in the town of Bakhmut. The situation on the road, according to Luhansk defense command head Serhiy Haidai, was on May 27 largely unchanged since Thursday: the road was open to traffic and controlled by the UAF, but being shelled by RF forces at multiple locations.
The UAF high command on May 27 reportedly canceled the press accreditation of Yury Butusov, one of Ukraine’s leading combat correspondents, for reporting on weak UAF control of the road, photographing a critical bridge across the Siviersky Donets River, and failing to register his presence at the front line with local command.
Butusov in a statement on his news platform censor.net claimed UAF senior officers were banning him from forward positions to prevent the Ukrainian public from finding out about poor supply and weak commanders on the fighting line.
Haidai said reporters not obeying military commanders needed to be prevented from approaching UAF positions, because of the risk of the RF gaining useful intelligence from the journalists’ reports.
Ukraine’s Army General Staff on May 27 said secondary RF attacks were launched towards the town of Lyman, to the north of Severodonetsk, and towards the towns of Pokrovsky and Kliovye, to the south of Severodonetsk. The statement claimed UAF defenses were holding, at times with difficulty. According to the report RF forces gained “limited success” in the village Ustinovka, to the east of the town Lysychansk.
Capture of Lysychansk would give RF forces control of commanding terrain in the vicinity, and effectively sever all supply to Severodonetsk.
In the southern sector, according to the Zaporizhia defense command, RF forces did not make any attempts advance, but shelled UAF units at some locations. According to UAF intelligence, RF command was reinforcing units in the south, and one them had been fully-equipped with obsolete T-62 tanks shipped to the sector from deep inside Russia. Ukrainian social media started posting images of the vehicles, dating back to the Vietnam War era, early in the week, and tracked their progress to a rail station in the RF-occupied town Melitopil, where they unloaded.
The UAF intelligence report also claimed Russian forces in the south are building defensive positions, and had mined the southern coast of the Kakhova Reservoir. military is building a third line of defense, reinforcing and consolidating to maintain its position in southern Ukraine. The engineering units of the occupiers mined the coast of the Kakhovka Reservoir.
