A headline from London’s Guardian newspaper sums up recent developments in the Donbas neatly, if awfully: “Kyiv orders troops to pull out of Sievierodonetsk as fears grow Lysychansk also set to fall.” Ukraine feared that had its troops remained in the fiercely contested eastern city, they could have been encircled by Russian forces. 

The governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, painted a bleak picture, saying that constant bombardment has turned most of Sievierodonetsk into “rubble” and that “all critical infrastructure has been destroyed. Ninety percent of the city is damaged, 80 percent [of] houses will have to be demolished,” the Guardian reported. 

In other dispiriting news, dolphins are dying by the thousands in the Black Sea. The Ukrainian news website Nexta reported that at least 3,000 have died in that large body of water because of the war, according to scientists. Apparently sonar from navy ships as well as explosions are preventing the dolphins from finding food, and they have been washing ashore on sections of the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania.

In the meantime, even as Russia inches closer to one of its stated aims, taking full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, there were yet more signs Friday that the violence gripping many parts of Ukraine is not slowing down. The Moscow Times reported that a Kremlin-appointed official in southern Ukraine’s Russian-occupied city of Kherson was killed in an apparent car bomb attack, as local authorities reported on Friday. 

The Moscow-appointed deputy head of the Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, said on Telegram that the official died “as a result of a terrorist act in the city of Kherson.” The newpaper said the attack was the latest in a string of apparent car bombings reported out of Kherson in recent weeks that are targeting pro-Russia figures.

An aide to the head of Kherson administration loyal to Kyiv, Sergiy Khlan, took to Facebook to laud the attack, saying, “Our partisans have one more victory” with the killing of the “pro-Russian activist and traitor.”

Meanwhile in western and northern Ukraine, dozens of Russian missiles rained down on military facilities, Reuters reported, but not all hits were successful. “In the morning, during mass rocket fire on the Zhytomyr region by Russian planes from Belarus, our defenders shot down about 10 missiles, which were aimed at the infrastructure facilities of the region,” the head of the Zhytomyr regional military administration,  Vitalii Bunechko, said.

Ahead of this month’s NATO summit at Madrid, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has claimed that the EU and NATO are gathering a coalition to slug it out against Moscow. During a press conference in Azerbaijan, he said, “When the Second World War began, after all, Hitler gathered a significant part, if not a large part, of European countries under his banners for the war against the Soviet Union. Now also, including the European Union together with NATO , they are gathering such an already modern coalition to fight wars with the Russian Federation.”