On Friday, May 27, heavy fighting continues in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces continue their offensive to encircle Severodonetsk, but Ukrainians are still holding on. The US have estimated that Russia has lost around 1 000 tanks in the first three months of the war, while Western intelligence pointed to a deportation campaign that has allegedly resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, CNN, Ukrinform and Nexta TV report.
In the 24 hours to the morning of Friday, the Donbas battle continued to rage, while Ukraine suffered air strikes and shelling in other places and noticed the amassing of occupation forces in the south from Crimea.
As difficult as it is for the Ukrainian Armed Forces to hold their positions in the east, where the borders of the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk and Kharkiv meet, they do not seem to be retreating from their last large outpost in Severodonetsk and Lysichansk.
Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomorenko wrote about this on Twitter adding a map, where Ukrainian-controlled territory is pictured in blue.
pic.twitter.com/1JTdryQzmt
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) May 26, 2022
Ponomorenko also shared a rare video of Ukrainian airborne troops fighting near Lysichansk. Soldier says in Russian: «We will survive.»
pic.twitter.com/oeDkFsGeTD
— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) May 26, 2022
Russian tank losses in Ukraine near 1 000, US says
Russian forces have lost nearly 1,000 tanks, over 350 artillery pieces, as well as almost three dozen fighter bomber fixed-wing aircraft and more than 50 helicopters thus far in Ukraine, according to an official of the US Department of Defence, as quoted by CNN and Ukrinform.
Despite all the losses, the official evaluated that Russians «still have the … majority of their capability left to them.»
«They have invested an awful lot of their hardware and their personnel in this fight, and the Ukrainians have suffered losses, the Russians have suffered losses,» the unnamed defence official was quoted as saying.
The official noted that Russia still has superiority over Ukraine in terms of human and military resources, Ukrinform reports.
Deportations reminiscent of Stalin’s atrocities
In occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of citizens of Ukraine have been processed through a series of Russian «filtration camps» in Eastern Ukraine and moved to Russia as part of a program of forced deportation, CNN reports, referring to four sources familiar with the latest Western intelligence information.
Some Ukrainians were described as having voluntarily entered filtration camps to try to move away from the fighting by entering Russia, many have been detained up against their will at check points and in bomb shelters. In the camps, CNN’s sources and eyewitnesses say, people are held in inhuman conditions, interrogated and sometimes tortured.
After deporting them into Russia, many Ukrainians have been then taken to far and poor areas across Russia, the Far East Sakhalin Island, being one of the most extreme examples mentioned by the CNN. The American media organisation also quoted that sources as saying that in some cases Russia would provide housing in residential areas and a small amount of money, while others are dropped off with nothing and expected to survive on their own just as the practice of Joseph Stalin’s mass deportations was in the 1940s.