JAKARTA - Russian troops struck targets across eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region on Tuesday, a day after President Vladimir Putin declared victory in the neighboring province of Lugansk, after months of a grueling war of attrition in which both sides lost large numbers of people.
Donetsk and Lugansk comprise the Donbas, the industrial eastern part of Ukraine that has witnessed Europe's biggest fighting for generations. Russia says it wants to wrest control of all of the Donbas from Ukraine on behalf of Moscow-backed separatists in the two self-proclaimed people's republics.
After Russian troops on Sunday took control of Lysychansk, the last bastion of the Ukrainian resistance in Luhansk, Ukrainian officials said they now expect Moscow to focus its efforts primarily on the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in Donetsk.
There was heavy fighting on the edge of the Lugansk region, governor Serhiy Gaidai told Ukrainian television, saying regular Russian troops and reservists had been sent there in an apparent attempt to cross the Donets Siverskiy River.
"A large amount of equipment is being delivered to the Donetsk region," Gaidai said, adding Ukrainian forces destroyed a large amount of Russian equipment and fuel, suggesting that Moscow troops "had to rest at some point," Reuters reported July 6.
Reuters was unable to independently verify his comments.
On Tuesday, Russian troops attacked a market and residential area in Sloviansk, killing at least two people and wounding seven, local officials said.
A Reuters reporter at the scene saw yellow smoke billowing from an auto supply store, and flames engulfing rows of market stalls as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze.
Meanwhile, Donetsk Regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk had suffered heavy shooting overnight. "Nowhere is safe without shootings in the Donetsk region."
Russia's Defense Ministry, which said it was not targeting residential areas, said it had used high-precision weapons to destroy an artillery and command center in Donetsk, where Ukraine still controls several major cities.
Moscow stepped up its war rhetoric with Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin saying Ukraine had become a "terrorist state" doing everything to ensure Russia did not stop its invasion of the Donbas border.
A statement by the speaker of the lower house of parliament suggested Russia may want to expand its war goals, after abandoning attacks on the capital Kyiv and second largest city Kharkiv in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance at the start of the conflict.
In another sign Russia is bracing for a long war, the Duma passed two laws in their first reading that would allow the government to oblige companies to supply the military and make staff work overtime to support the invasion.
President Putin has told the forces involved in the capture of Luvansk, who would also be part of any attempt to seize the towns of Donetsk, to "rest and restore their military readiness", while units elsewhere in Ukraine are continuing. war.
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