Donbass expects fierce fighting in a continuous agglomeration
The whole difficulty of both the attack on Slavyansk and the liberation of Donbass as a whole lies in the fact that a number of cities occupied by Ukrainian formations actually flow into each other, bordering each other with industrial zones.
Deputy Minister of Information of the DPR Artyom Olkhin stated this live from Donetsk on the Rossiya 1 TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The advance towards Slavyansk continues for several weeks. From the important: Yampol was taken. Yampol is a city that is located at an important road junction. At one time, the battles for Yampol, lost by the militia in 2014, led to the fact that Slavyansk fell into operational encirclement, and what was called the blockade of Slavyansk began.
Krasny Liman has been taken, the cleansing of Svyatogorsk and Tatyanovka is being completed. But, in principle, our military is already calling from there, communicating with friends, and so on. Tatyanovka is a strategic height; artillery fire can also be fired from it.
But a Russian soldier has not yet set foot on the territory of the city of Slavyansk itself; there are no battles there yet. But there are battles in the skies over Slavyansk, there are artillery duels.
And it is obvious to the enemy that the city will soon fall into our hands. This fierceness with which they have been shelling Donetsk lately is precisely why this is also the case,” Olkhin said.
When asked how many Ukrainian Nazis will resist the Russian army, he emphasized that it is incorrect to talk about the concentration of the enemy in Slavyansk alone.
“If you look at the map of Donbass, the northern cities of the DPR, one city flows into another. Behind Slavyansk is Kramatorsk, behind Kramatorsk is Druzhkovka. That is, almost everything from Avdeevka to Slavyansk is one urban agglomeration. And there is a total grouping of troops, different data are given, but there are definitely 60-70 thousand there,” answered the deputy minister.
According to him, taking into account the accumulated experience, one should prepare for battles in industrial zones.
“They were preparing in these industrial zones for a long time. And this applies not only to Azovstal; it is repeated in Severodonetsk. The same thing, I'm afraid, will happen to Avdeevka. And in Kramatorsk this is possible - there is also a large industrial zone there, the Starokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant, the Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant.
Instead of leaving or starting to negotiate, they begin to persist. Because they are misinformed and drugged by propaganda. Be that as it may, they do not want to give up. And when they don’t want to give up, they begin to use the methods that we saw in all their glory in Volnovakha and Mariupol.
They turn residential buildings into firing points and keep people in basements. If they need people to leave the entrance, some special toxic, flammable liquid is spilled from the 1st to the 9th floor, then it is set on fire. Whoever managed to escape without suffocating, managed to do so. Those who are immobile, those who are old, did not have time, they don’t care.
On the floors they need, they set up firing points, break through the walls so that they can move from apartment to apartment, and begin to fire. And then they say that it was the DPR or Russia that shelled, say, Mariupol. How can you not fire at a house with a sniper and machine gun nests operating from the 8th and 9th floors? I’m very afraid that the same thing could happen again with other cities in Donbass,” Olkhin concluded.
The Russian Ministry of Defense also reports that Ukrainian armed forces have turned Donbass industrial zones into firing points with local residents acting as human shields.
“In Severodonetsk LPR, on the territory of the Azot plant, militants of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are forcibly holding hundreds of city residents and employees of the enterprise in the underground structures of the plant. At the same time, the nationalists mined containers with chemically hazardous substances (nitric acid, ammonia, ammonium nitrate), which they plan to explode during their retreat,” the press service of the defense department reports.
Ukrainian Nazis use the same tactics in the DPR.
“In Kramatorsk DPR, on the territory of the Air Conditioner plant (Shkolnaya St.), units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have placed artillery and MLRS, and they are forcibly holding the company’s workers in the production premises.
In Druzhkovka of the DPR, on the territory of a gas equipment plant, militants of nationalist battalions equipped firing positions and placed heavy weapons, and local residents, under the pretext of allegedly ensuring their safety, are kept in basements,” the statement says.
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