Ukraine takes swaths of territory, despite Russia’s mobilisation

On September 30, Ukrainian forces advancing from Izyum surrounded Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region and recaptured the town the following day.

Ukraine’s general staff said its forces discovered a convoy of civilian cars near Shchastya containing 200 Russian soldiers from the Second Army Corps escaping Lyman.

“There has been a decrease in the level of moral and psychological state of enemy personnel, leading to numerous instances of soldiers … abandoning their positions,” said the general staff.

The fall of Lyman came on the very day Russia fielded new troops from its September 21 compulsory mobilisation.

In an address to the Ukrainian people on October 3, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said these Russian reinforcements were already being killed.

Meanwhile, the militia of the pro-Russian self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said it had repulsed “repeated attempts” by Ukrainian forces to break through to the oil refinery at Lysychansk, the last city to fall to Russian forces in that region on July 3.

Ukraine’s deputy chief of military intelligence, Vadym Skibitskiy, told the news website Krym.Realii that Russia had redeployed Black Sea Fleet service personnel from the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea to Novorossiysk, southern Russia, to avoid casualties, after a series of explosions.

The head of Ukrainian intelligence services predicted that after a lull for the European winter, Ukrainian forces would likely enter Crimea by the end of spring, in mid-2023.

The fall of Lyman revealed a rift between Russian regular forces and Chechen leader and militia commander Ramzan Kadyrov, who openly criticised the Russian commander in the east, Alexander Lapin.

After the fall of Lyman, Kadyrov also said Russia should contemplate the use of low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said any attack on the annexed regions would be considered an attack on Russia itself.

The United States said it saw no evidence that Russia was readying nuclear weapons for battlefield use.