Heavy fighting raged on Saturday in Lysychansk, a city in eastern Ukraine at the heart of the battle for control of the Donbas region, which pro-Russian separatists say they have "completely" surrounded, a claim denied by the Ukrainian army.
“Fighting is raging around Lysychansk. Fortunately, the city is not surrounded and it is under the control of the Ukrainian army,” Ruslan Mouzychuk, spokesman for the National Guard of Ukraine, told television.
The Moscow-backed separatists had claimed shortly before that they had "completely" surrounded Lysychansk.
"Today, the people's militia of Lugansk [the separatist army, editor's note] and the Russian armed forces occupied the last strategic heights, which allows us to affirm that the locality of Lysychansk is completely surrounded", declared Andrey Maroshko, a representative for the militia, quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.