Lyman is the second midsize Ukrainian city to fall to Russia’s forces this week.

Russian forces’ capturing of the eastern city of Lyman, which both Russian and Ukrainian officials confirmed on Friday, makes it the second midsize Ukrainian city to change hands this week.

And with Russia’s artillery superiority in the fighting on the rolling plains of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine — where Moscow has focused its war effort after losses around the capital, Kyiv, and in the country’s north — it is apparently close to seizing the easternmost Ukrainian city still under Ukrainian control, Sievierodonetsk.

The capture of Lyman, a city with a prewar population of about 20,000 near a strategic highway, followed intense artillery bombardments, including from one of the most fearsome weapons in Russia’s conventional arsenal, a rocket artillery system firing thermobaric explosives. Also known as fuel-air bombs, these explosives set off huge, destructive shock waves. Read more

@nytimes