Key city’s fate hangs in the balance as fighting rages in eastern Ukraine

Sievierodonetsk is the last pocket of the region that Russia has not yet claimed control of

A Ukrainian tank is in position during heavy fighting on the front line in Severodonetsk. Picture: Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP

Russian forces pounded an eastern Ukrainian city on Thursday and the two sides waged pitched street battles that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said could determine the fate of the critical Donbas region.

In the wake of a series of setbacks in the three-month-old war, Russia set its sights on the industrial Donbas region of coal mines and factories, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian troops for years and where they already held swaths of territory before the invasion.