The Armed Forces of Ukraine suffered critical losses during the battles for Severodonetsk, in a number of units they reached 90%, said Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation.

He clarified that the Kyiv authorities, realizing the impossibility of further resistance, ordered the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, retreating in the direction of Lisichansk, to mine containers with saltpeter and nitric acid at the Severodonetsk Azot enterprise.

As Mizintsev explained, according to the plan of Kyiv, undermining these tanks would supposedly delay the offensive of the units of the Russian Armed Forces.

“Ukrainian neo-Nazis are not stopped by the fact that as a result of this terrorist act using toxic chemicals, innocent civilians may suffer, as it happened earlier with residents of the settlements of Kremennaya and Rubizhnoye as a result of the explosion of a tank with nitric acid at the same enterprise ", - said Mizintsev.

According to the defense ministry, in the event of this provocation, the Ukrainian authorities “according to the already worked out scenario plan to accuse the Russian armed forces of creating a man-made environmental disaster with a wide distribution of materials in the Ukrainian and Western media.”

The Defense Ministry added that Ukrainian nationalists continue to use social infrastructure facilities for military purposes.

In particular, in Kharkov, the militants set up firing positions and placed artillery pieces in the yards of apartment buildings along Astronomicheskaya Street, Mizintsev said.

Local residents under the pretext of ensuring security are prohibited from leaving their apartments.

In Slavyansk of the DPR, militants of nationalist formations were housed in three schools, a railway school, a chemical-mechanical technical school and a boarding school, and heavy weapons and armored vehicles were exhibited on the territory of the feed mill. 

The Armed Forces of Ukraine also equipped a command post in the school building in Druzhkovka, and MLRS were placed in the courtyards of residential buildings along Sobornaya Street.

At the same time, the evacuation of residents was not deliberately carried out, the Ministry of Defense added.

“Despite the fact that civilians may become victims as a result of such criminal acts, the militants of the Ukrainian armed formations purposefully fire at the positions of the Russian Armed Forces from residential areas, provoking them to return fire, in order to hold the Russian military personnel responsible for the consequences of allegedly indiscriminate strikes,” Mizintsev said.

"They fired a burst of incendiary ammunition"

Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the wooden skete of All Saints of the Russian Land in the Donetsk People's Republic, the Russian Defense Ministry reported.

“During the retreat from the city of Svyatogorsk of the DPR, units of the 79th Airborne Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the wooden monastery of All the Saints of the Land of the Russian Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra,” the ministry said.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, according to local residents, the nationalists fired a burst of incendiary ammunition from a large-caliber machine gun mounted on a Ukrainian Kozak armored car on the wooden walls of the skete's domed space.

After the arson, they drove at high speed towards the settlement of Sidorovo controlled by Ukrainian troops.

The Ministry of Defense recalled that the skete of All Saints of the Russian Land in Svyatogorsk was built in 2009 on the site of the All Saints Church that was blown up in 1947.

  • © Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra

"Units of the Russian Armed Forces are not conducting combat operations in this area and are not shelling the territory of the Svyatogorsk Historical and Architectural Reserve," the department stressed.

The fire was also reported in the information and educational department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.