The authorities of the “LPR” and the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced on the morning of July 2 that the city of Lisichansk in the north-west of the Luhansk region was “completely surrounded” by Russian troops and forces of the “LPR”, in Ukraine they claim that the city is still under the control of the country’s armed forces .
Kadyrov was the first to tell about the situation in Lisichansk. In his morning Telegram post, he, referring to Zamir Chalaev, the commander of the special police regiment named after Akhmat-Khadzhi Kadyrov, stated that “the trap has closed”: “Lysichansk is completely surrounded by allied forces. <…> The enemy, in turn, has nowhere to go, since all entrances and exits from the city are blocked. Breaking through the dense ring of encirclement will not work, even if you try very hard.
Later, Andrei Marochko, an officer of the people's militia of the "LPR", confirmed his words. “The last strategically important heights have been occupied, which allow us to say that the settlement of Lisichansk is in complete encirclement,” he told TASS.
In the afternoon, Kadyrov announced that "Lysichansk is ours!": Allied units are already in the city center! He then posted a video in which unidentified civilians and several military men are photographed against the backdrop of the Soviet flag. “The Red Banner of Victory was erected in the central park of Lysichansk to commemorate the liberation of the city from Ukrainian nationalist formations,” he wrote. True, from the video you can understand that people are photographed not in the "central park", but against the background of the memorial to the participants of the Second World War "In Memory of the Fallen", opened on Lenin Avenue in 2001.
In turn, the representative of the National Guard of Ukraine, Ruslan Muzychuk, speaking on television during the day, said that "fierce battles are going on near Lysychansk", but the city itself "is not surrounded, it is under the control of Ukrainian troops."