Russia claims full control of Ukraine’s Luhansk region for third time
The Russian Defence Ministry claimed on Wednesday that its forces had taken full control of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, which together with Donetsk makes up the coal-rich Donbas, control of which has always been the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in its invasion of its neighbour.
In a statement issued on Wednesday morning, the ministry claimed that units belonging to Russia’s Western military contingent had “completed the liberation of the Luhansk People's Republic”, referring to the unrecognised autonomous government that has claimed the region since 2014, and which Russia has claimed as its territory since 2022.
However, a source in the command of the 11th Corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) which defends the Ukrainian line in Luhansk, denied the Russian reports, telling Novaya Gazeta Europe that the AFU continued to hold its positions in the region.
The vast majority of Luhansk has been under Russian control since an initial rapid advance in the early stages of the war in 2022, but a small area in the west of the region, bordering the Kharkiv region, was retaken by Ukrainian forces in a successful counteroffensive later that year. Since then, the front line in Kharkiv and Luhansk has remained largely static.
This is not the first time that Russia has claimed to have captured the entire region. As recently as June, the head of the Russian administration in Luhansk, Leonid Pasechnik, claimed that the region was 100% under Russian control. Three months later, however, Vladimir Putin conceded that approximately 0.13% of the region’s territory was still in Ukrainian hands.
According to Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military and political observer at Ukraine’s Information Resistance Group, the two small areas of the Luhansk region still under Kyiv’s control amount to approximately 80km2.
One of the few settlements in Luhansk still in Ukrainian hands is the village of Novoyehorivka, which had a pre-war population of just 36. In January, the Russian Defence Ministry announced that its Western military contingent had successfully expelled Ukrainian troops from the village, a claim that was immediately rejected by commentators on both sides.
Citing sources on the front lines, popular pro-Kremlin blogger Yury Podolyaka accused the leadership of the Western contingent of deliberately deceiving Russia’s central command and claiming fake advances to cover up their “incompetence”.
Kovalenko told Novaya Europe that Moscow’s latest claim to have full control of Luhansk appeared to be yet another “credit-line land grab”, and said that Russia was increasingly resorting to making untrue statements of military victories in Ukraine amid a string of battleground failures.
