War escalates after annexations

Fighting escalated in Ukraine yesterday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed four territories of the country, earning condemnations from both friends and allies.

Russia yesterday said its troops had abandoned their bastion of Lyman in Ukraine's east for fear of encirclement and the leader of Chechnya, a close Kremlin ally, said Moscow should consider using a low-yield nuclear weapon in response.

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The fall of the town is a major setback for Moscow after President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the annexation of the Donetsk region, along with three other regions, at a ceremony on Friday that was condemned by Kyiv and the West as a farce.

"Allied forces were withdrawn from the settlement of ... Lyman to more advantageous lines because of the creation of the threat of encirclement," Russia's Ministry of Defence said.

The statement ended hours of official silence from Moscow after Kyiv first said it had surrounded thousands of Russian troops in the area and then that its forces were inside the town of Lyman.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya who describes himself as a footsoldier of Putin, said he was unable to remain silent after Moscow abandoned the territory, which the Kremlin had proclaimed to be part of Russia just a day earlier.

"In my personal opinion, more drastic measures should be taken, right up to the declaration of martial law in the border areas and the use of low-yield nuclear weapons," Kadyrov wrote on Telegram in a post in which he derided a Russian general.

The Russian defence ministry's statement made no mention of its troops being encircled.

"The Russian grouping in the area of Lyman is surrounded," Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesperson for Ukraine's eastern forces, said hours earlier.

He said that Russia had had 5,000 to 5,500 troops at Lyman but the number of encircled troops could be lower because of casualties.

"We're already in Lyman, but there are battles," the spokesperson said on television.

Two grinning Ukrainian soldiers taped the yellow-and-blue national flag on to the welcome sign at the town's entrance in Donetsk region's north, a video posted by the president's chief of staff showed.

Neither side's battlefield assertions could be independently verified.

Russia has used Lyman as a logistics and transport hub for its operations in the north of the Donetsk region. Its fall would be Ukraine's biggest battlefield gain since a lightning counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region last month.

The Ukrainian military spokesperson said the capture of Lyman would allow Kyiv to advance into the Luhansk region, whose full capture Moscow announced at the beginning of July after weeks of slow, grinding advances.

Donetsk and Luhansk regions together make up the wider Donbas region that has been a major focus for Russia since soon after the start of Moscow's invasion on Feb. 24 in what it called a "special military operation" to demilitarise its neighbour.

Putin proclaimed the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be Russian land in Friday's ceremony - a swathe of territory equal to about 18 percent of Ukraine's total surface land area.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials yesterday accused Russia of gunning down 24 civilians, including children, in an attack on a road convoy near a recently recaptured town in the eastern Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian troops on Friday had shown AFP reporters a group of vehicles riddled with bullet holes and several corpses in civilian clothes, a short distance east of Kupiansk.

Ukraine and its Western allies branded Russia's annexations as illegal. Kyiv vowed to continue liberating its land of Russian forces and said it would not hold peace talks with Moscow while Putin remained as president.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the US-led military alliance Nato to grant his country fast-track membership.

He also vowed never to hold talks with Russia as long as Putin was in power.

On Friday, Russia vetoed a Western bid at the UN Security Council to condemn its annexations of Ukrainian territory but found no support, with China and India abstaining.

Russia's veto was a certainty but Western powers hoped to show Moscow's isolation in its war and will now take the condemnation effort to the General Assembly, where every nation has a vote and none can kill a resolution.

The resolution, co-sponsored by the United States and Albania, would have condemned the "illegal" referendums held in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and called on all states not to recognize any changes to Ukraine's borders. It also would have called on Russia to withdraw troops immediately from Ukraine, ending an invasion launched on February 24.

Alongside China and India, Brazil and Gabon also abstained.