Russia is targeting the eastern region of Donetsk after seizing Kyiv’s last major foothold in nearby Luhansk, a regional official said on Monday.

Luhansk Governor Serhiy Haidai told Reuters he expects Russia to target Sloviansk and Bakhmut in particular, as the Kremlin seeks to take control of the larger Donbass region, which includes both Luhansk and Donetsk, in the last phase of its invasion. While Haidai said Ukrainian forces still controlled a “small part” of Luhansk, the loss of the city of Lysychansk means Moscow has captured almost the entire region.

The mayor of Sloviansk said on Sunday the city had suffered the “heaviest shelling” in recent times, with President Volodymyr Zelensky later saying six people had been killed and 20 injured.

“We have to win the war, not the battle of Lysychansk,” Haidai said of the city’s loss, adding that Ukrainian troops would have risked being surrounded by Russian forces had they stayed. “It hurts a lot, but it’s not losing the war.”

In a separate interview with local TV on Monday, Haidai said fighting continued in nearby Bilohorivka region overnight, noting that Ukraine maintained control of “a small part” of the Luhansk region. . “But every day, every hour, as long as we hold them back and don’t let them pass, even here in the Luhansk region, it’s positive for our troops,” he said.

However, the governor added that Ukrainian forces lacked enough long-range weapons to significantly alter the course of events locally, saying, “There are weapons, but not enough.”

Haidai also noted that most people had left the site of recent battles, with around 10,000 people remaining in Lysychansk and another 7,000 in the twin city of Severodonetsk, which fell to Russian forces in June.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told an audience of allied leaders and institutional donors on Monday that the decisions they would take in the coming days could be the “first big decisive step towards the historic victory of the democratic world” over Russia.

Zelensky was speaking virtually during the opening session of the Ukraine Recovery Conference, which is taking place Monday and Tuesday in Lugano, Switzerland. Leaders of the European Union and its Member States, global financial institutions and international organizations as well as Ukrainian officials met there to discuss what Ukraine needs to recover from the war and its cost.

They hope to agree on some sort of “Marshall Plan” – America’s financial recovery plan for post-World War II Europe – for 21st century Ukraine, as Zelensky has previously called it an idea. .

In his opening remarks, Zelensky presented support for the reconstruction of Ukraine as a way for Europe to prove that it can defend itself when its territory and its values ​​are under attack.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine is not just an attempt to seize our land and destroy our state institutions or break our independence,” he said. “It’s a much bigger confrontation – the confrontation of perspectives. The anti-democratic and anti-European system that is being built in Russia seeks to prove that it is supposedly more powerful than all of us – Ukraine, Europe and the democratic world. He seeks to prove that Europe is supposedly weak and supposedly incapable of defending its values.

Zelensky said rebuilding Ukraine and giving its people opportunities and reasons to stay was necessary to achieve peace and stability after the war. “Of course, it involves construction…big funding, huge investment,” he added.

“It is this conference and its decisions that can become the first big step towards the historic victory of the democratic world,” he added. “The reconstruction of Ukraine will be the greatest contribution to the maintenance of world peace.”

Britain was due to unveil a new financial support package for Ukraine at the conference – including $1.7 billion in loans and grants through the World Bank, $12 million in direct funding for energy infrastructure repairs and nearly $50 million in guaranteed loans to Ukraine’s national energy transmission. operator via the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, according to the British government.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said the European Union would set up a platform to coordinate projects related to Ukraine’s construction. Brussels “has mobilized around 6.2 billion euros ($6.48 billion) in financial support” since the start of the war, she said, adding that “more will come”.

As the war in Ukraine continues to disrupt agricultural production and shipments, the country’s exports of grains, vegetable oils and other commodities in 2022 “are not expected to exceed 35% of the 2021 total”, according to British government figures.

“Russia’s blockade of Odessa continues to severely limit grain exports from Ukraine,” Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence assessment on Monday. Russia has blocked ships carrying agricultural exports from leaving Ukraine through the Black Sea port. Kyiv and Moscow blame each other for the blockage, while the United Nations negotiates an agreement to avoid a hunger crisis in countries that depend on imports from Ukraine to feed their populations.

At the start of the war, Ukraine also restricted certain food exports to ensure that its own population had enough.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Moscow of stealing grain stocks stored in areas currently occupied by Russian or pro-Russian forces, calling it “outright theft”. Ukraine’s ambassador to Turkey said on Sunday that Turkish authorities had detained the Zhibek Zholy, a Russian-flagged freighter which he said was loaded with stolen Ukrainian grain.

As the war continues, Pope Francis suggested in an interview published Monday that he could visit Ukraine and Russia to advocate for an end to the conflict – after tensions with the leader of the Orthodox Church Russian over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have held back the head of the Catholic Church from a meeting scheduled for June.

The pope told Reuters that a Vatican official had been in contact with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about a possible papal visit to Moscow.

“I would like to leave [to Ukraine]and I wanted to go to Moscow first,” he told Reuters.

“And now it is possible, after my return from Canada, it is possible that I can go to Ukraine,” he continued. “The first thing is to go to Russia to try to help one way or another, but I would like to go to both capitals.”

Francis sparked a diplomatic spat with Moscow when he said in an interview that he had told Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, not to be “Putin’s altar boy” during a a conversation in March. The pope has repeatedly condemned the war in Ukraine and its consequences, in particular the rise in food prices for the poorest countries. But he sometimes lent credence to the Kremlin’s argument that NATO expansion precipitated the invasion and said “there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys” in this conflict.