Russian troops have abandoned their bastion of Lyman in Ukraine’s east for fear of encirclement, said Moscow on Saturday reported Reuters. This comes just a day after the Kremlin had proclaimed the city as its own. "Allied forces were withdrawn from the settlement of...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 in a statement.
The statement by the Kremlin came hours after Kyiv had claimed that it had surrounded thousands of Russian troops in the area and then that its forces were inside the town of Layman.
Lyman had served as a logistics and transport hub for its operation in the north of Donetsk region. Its fall would be Ukraine's biggest battlefield gain since a lightning counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region last month, stated the Reuters report.
Quoting a Ukrainian military spokesperson as saying, the report stated that 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.
"Lyman is important because it is the next step towards the liberation of the Ukrainian Donbas. It is an opportunity to go further to Kreminna and Sievierodonetsk, and it is psychologically very important," he said.
Donetsk along with Luhansk regions together constitute the wider region of Donbas that has been a major focus for Russia since soon after the start of Moscow’s invasion on February 24 this year in what it called a “special military operation” to demilitarise its neighbour.
Vladimir 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% of Ukraine's total surface land area.