Cars full of families pulled out of the town of Kupiansk, which Ukraine recaptured just over a week ago as part of a stunning counter-offensive. Residents said they were forced to flee due to heavy shelling day and night. The Russians were shelling the town and surrounding villages, they said. Within a few days, Ukraine managed to recapture almost the entire Kharkiv region, liberating at least 300 settlements. The weakened Russian troops withdrew to a new defensive line on the east bank of the Oskil River, about 10 miles from the destroyed city of Izium. Others fled across the border back to Russia. Kupiansk, a strategic railway junction, is located on both sides of the river. It is on the new front line, after Ukrainian forces crossed the right bank on Friday. Now they are poised to push further into Luhansk province, which the Kremlin and its local proxies have controlled in full since June and in part since 2014. Locals in Kupyansk said they were told to move away and that the explosions were very loud. The city was now without power and water and it was difficult to get a proper phone connection, they said, adding that people were hiding in their basements or taking refuge in their garages. Four doctors were killed and two patients were wounded when Russian forces opened fire on a psychiatric hospital in the village of Streletsia, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said. The facility was in the process of being evacuated and medical staff were removing patients from the hospital when they were attacked. On Sunday, buses were transporting civilians to the town of Shevchenkove, outside the range of artillery fire. Hundreds of people who had spent six months under occupation lined up in the main square to register with the authorities. Others traveled in battered Lada cars and waited by the roadside at checkpoints. “We spent two days sitting in our cellar. It was impossible to continue like this, so we decided to leave,” said Valery Prihodko. He said he and his relatives had left Kupiansk and had no clear plans for where they would go next. “The fighting is very bad,” he said. Ukrainian armored vehicles were visible on the road leading to Kupyansk. The Kraken special forces unit, which was established in Kharkiv in March, said it was in control of the frontline city. It played an active role in this month’s blitzkrieg, in which Ukraine has recaptured 300 settlements and an area half the size of Wales. The unit released a video of dead Russian soldiers killed in combat. On Saturday he released a second video showing Russian prisoners repainting an entrance sign in Kupyansk with the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. “They clean up the trash themselves. All that’s left is to force these bastards to rebuild everything they destroyed,” one message read. Russia is now at risk of losing Lysychansk, a key Donbas city it captured in the summer after months of heavy fighting. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Kremlin has failed to send large-scale reinforcements. It was vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack, the thinktank said, while conducting an unprovoked and “robotic” attack on the town of Bakhmut. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that his armed forces would repeat their success in the Kharkiv region in other occupied areas of the country, including the southern city of Kherson. “Where there is Ukraine, there will be our flag. This atrocity – Russian fascism, repeating what the Nazis did – will not remain anywhere,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. Zelensky said Russia had set up torture chambers in more than 10 northeastern regions it occupied. They were located in the basement of the police headquarters in the city of Izium, as well as in Kupiansk, and at a railway station in the city of Kozacha Lopan. Russian interrogators electrocuted the victims using a sealed military field phone. On Sunday, police and coroners continued to unearth bodies from a mass grave in a pine forest on the outskirts of Izium. The dead – 443 of them since February – include more than 20 Ukrainian soldiers. Prosecutors say several had their hands tied together, as well as signs of torture, including broken limbs. The Czech Republic, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, called for an international war crimes tribunal to be set up after the discovery in Izium. “In the 21st century, such attacks against the civilian population are unthinkable and abhorrent,” said the country’s foreign minister, Jan Lipavský. “We must not overlook it. We support the punishment of all war criminals,” he added in a message on Twitter. “I call for the speedy establishment of a special international court to prosecute the crime of aggression.”
