Ukraine eyes more gains after Lyman

Tom Balmforth and Pavel Polityuk | October 3, 2022

Thousands of Russians mobilised for military service in Ukraine are being sent home as the military commissar in Russia’s Khabarovsk region is removed in the latest setback to President Vladimir Putin’s chaotic conscription of 300,000 servicemen.

On the battlefield, Putin suffered a stinging setback on Sunday when Ukrainian forces claimed full control of Russia’s eastern logistics hub of Lyman, their most significant gain in weeks.

Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two, after its forces suffered major battlefield defeats in Ukraine, has led to widespread discontent and forced thousands of men to flee abroad.

Mikhail Degtyarev, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia’s Far East, said several thousand men had reported for enlistment in 10 days but many were ineligible.

“About half of them we returned home as they did not meet the selection criteria for entering the military service,” Degtyarev said in a video post on the Telegram messaging app.

He said the region’s military commissar was removed but that his dismissal would not affect the mobilisation.

The mobilisation was billed as enlisting those with military experience but has often appeared oblivious to service records, health, student status and age.

The taking of Lyman by Ukrainian forces sets the stage for further advances aimed at cutting Russia’s supply lines to its battered troops to a single route.

Putin proclaimed the annexation of four regions covering nearly one fifth of Ukraine on Friday, an area that includes Lyman. 

Kyiv and the West have condemned the proclamation as an illegitimate farce.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the capture of the town, where Ukrainian flags were raised over civic buildings on Saturday, demonstrated that Ukraine is capable of dislodging Russian forces and showed the impact Ukraine’s deployment of advanced Western weapons was having on the conflict.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday said the success of the country’s soldiers was not limited to the recapture of Lyman.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday it was pulling troops out of the Lyman area “in connection with the creation of a threat of encirclement”.

It did not mention Lyman in its daily update on fighting in Ukraine on Sunday, although it said Russian forces had destroyed seven artillery and missile depots in the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Donetsk.

The recapture of Lyman by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s largest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region in September.

Control over Lyman could prove a “key factor” in helping Ukraine reclaim lost territory in the Luhansk region, its governor Serhiy Gaidai said.

Lyman commands a crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River, behind which Russia has been attempting to consolidate its defences, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said.

The areas Putin claimed as annexed just over seven months into Russia’s invasion of its neighbour – Donetsk and Luhansk plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south – are equal to about 18 per cent of Ukraine’s total surface land area.

Russia’s parliament will consider bills and ratification treaties to absorb the regions on Monday, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin said.

A pomp-filled Kremlin signing ceremony with the regions’ Russian-installed leaders on Friday failed to stem a wave of criticism within Russia of how its military operation is being handled.