Odesa next as Russia steps up attacks in Ukraine

Fighting was raging in the critical port city of Odessa and across Ukraine’s east as the US warned that Moscow was preparing formally to annex embattled regions.

A Ukrainian soldier kisses his wife, who he had not seen for nearly a year, after she fled from the Russian-occupied eastern village of Novomykhailivka and arrived by car at an evacuation point in Zaporizhzhia. Picture: Getty Images

Fighting was raging in the critical port city of Odessa and across Ukraine’s east as the US warned that Moscow was preparing formally to annex embattled regions.

Fresh evacuations of civilians from war-ravaged Mariupol were expected late on Tuesday AEST, while the EU told member states to brace for a complete breakdown in Russian gas supplies as it prepared a new package of sanctions sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.

After failing to take the capital Kyiv, Moscow has shifted its two-month-old invasion to largely Russian-speaking areas and has stepped up pressure on Odessa, a celebrated cultural hub on the Black Sea.

Odesa’s city council said that a Russian strike hit a residential building housing five people. A 15-year-old boy was killed and a girl was hospitalised, the council said.

Fighting was particularly intense in eastern Ukraine around Izyum, Lyman and Rubizhne as Russia prepared an attack on Severodonetsk, the farthest city still under Kyiv’s control.

In Lyman, relentless shelling has reduced hamlets around the city to rubble.

“Half of the city is destroyed,” said one resident, lifting luggage onto the roof of his beat-up Soviet-designed Lada car. “I don’t have a house anymore.”

People disembark a van in Zaporizhzhia after arriving at an evacuation point for people fleeing Mariupol, Melitopol and the surrounding towns under Russian control. Picture: Getty Images

The Governor of the eastern ­region of Luhansk expected more intense battles before May 9, the day Russia annually celebrates the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to allied forces, including the then Soviet Union.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, however, told Italian television that Moscow’s forces “will not artificially adjust their ­actions to any date, including ­Victory Day”.

Whatever Russia’s military decisions, the US warned that ­Moscow was preparing imminently to annex Luhansk and neighbouring Donetsk.

Pro-Russian separatists in the two regions declared independence in 2014 but Moscow has so far stopped short of formally incorporating them as it did that year with the Crimean peninsula.

“Russia plans to engineer referenda upon joining sometime in mid-May,” said Michael Carpenter the US ambassador to the ­Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He said Russia was considering a similar plan in a third ­region, Kherson, where Moscow has recently solidified control and imposed use of its ­rouble currency.

“Such sham referenda – fabricated votes – will not be considered legitimate, nor will any attempts to annex additional Ukrainian territory,” Mr Carpenter said. “But we have to act with a sense of urgency.”

In Mariupol an untold number have died and survivors have little access to food, water and medicine as Russia battles to connect southern and eastern strips it controls.

Kyiv said more than 100 civilians were evacuated at the weekend from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, where soldiers and civilians have been sheltering in a maze of underground tunnels.

A Mariupol resident is emotional after arriving at an evacuation point in Zaporizhzhia for people fleeing the devastated city. Picture: Getty Images

Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov unit, said that another 20 people were taken out on Monday night but only after a five-hour delay as “the enemy’s artillery caused new rubble and destruction”.

After living for weeks in underground shelters or shut in at home, Mariupol’s residents are emerging to find their once-vibrant port city a devastated ruin.

In one eastern district, none of the nine-storey Soviet-era apartment blocks lining the streets are intact. The buildings’ facades are charred and torn apart by shelling, and some have collapsed entirely.

Shops have been looted and several freshly dug graves can be seen in the grassy alley that runs in the middle of a boulevard. There is no running water, no electricity, no gas, no mobile network and no internet.

Ukrainian forces have recaptured some territory in recent days, including the northeast village of Ruska Lozova, which evacuees said had been occupied for two months. “It was two months of terrible fear. Nothing else, a terrible and relentless fear,” Natalia, a 28-year-old evacuee said after reaching nearby Kharkiv.

But Kyiv has admitted that Russian forces have captured a string of villages in the east and has asked Western powers to deliver more heavy weapons to bolster its defences there.

A fresh EU sanctions package was set to include “more Russian banks” being pushed out of the global SWIFT network, the bloc’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said.

AFP