The Ukrainian army’s recapture of the strategic eastern city of Lyman on Sunday deals a new blow to the Kremlin just hours after it pushed through its illegal annexations of four Ukrainian regions and will likely give fresh mettle to Kyiv’s counteroffensives at other points around the country. 

On Sunday afternoon President Zelensky announced that “Lyman is cleared fully. Thank you to our militaries, our warriors.” Adding vigorous insult to Moscow’s injury — the loss of a key supply line — Ukrainians had Russians literally running scared from a territory that as recently as Friday President Putin claimed as Moscow’s own.

The routing of Russian forces from Lyman, a historic railway hub in Donetsk, which is part of the larger Donbass region that is nominally still under Russian occupation, was by no means pretty. Scenes of destruction prevailed; a German journalist with BILD magazine reported seeing battle-scarred streets strewn with the  bodies of Russian soldiers.

Even some normally bombastic Russian newspapers such as Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on the stunning Russian setback with uncharacteristic dismay.  The AP reported that just hours after Mr. Zelensky’s announcement, Ukrainian media shared an image of Ukrainian troops carrying the country’s yellow-and-blue flag in front of a statue marking the village of Torske, nine miles east of Lyman and within sight of the Russian-held Luhansk region.

Momentum is with Ukraine as multiple sources report that a fresh counteroffensive in the more central Kherson could be under way. Could this be what political scientist Francis Fukuyama was referring to in a tweet today that read, “A much bigger Russian collapse will unfold in the coming days”?

Possibly. Mr. Zelensky also said that Ukrainian forces had retaken Arkhangelske and Myrolyubivka, both towns in the Kherson region.  The Telegraph at London reported that a video clip posted to Twitter showed a Ukrainian soldier waving the flag in the newly liberated village of Zolota Balka, which is also in the Kherson Oblast, or region.

Although it would appear logical that with the liberation of Lyman Ukraine has the complete recapture of the northern Donbas in its sights, Kyiv has fooled Moscow before. That happened most notably last month, when Russia and the world were primed for a Ukrainian counteroffensive at Kherson but watched as the Kharkiv region was liberated instead.

At least one individual hinted that Ukraine may actually be on the verge of retaking Crimea.  On Saturday a mysterious explosion at a Russian airfield at Sevastopol sent plumes of black smoke billowing over a beach. Mr. Zelensky’s representative to Russian-occupied Crimea, Tamila Tasheva, told the Guardian that the reintegration of Crimea “may not happen tomorrow, but I think it will be much quicker than I thought a year ago.” She added, “This is moment X.”

It was the success of Kyiv’s Kharkiv campaign that accelerated the Kremlin’s mobilization of more troops and the referendums that saw on Friday four Ukrainian regions illegally annexed by Russia. In  respect of the former, Russia appears to still be doing its level best to be as reviled by Ukrainians as possible, with Kyiv Independent reporting that “forced mobilization efforts in the occupied territories” are now underway. Russians are making rounds to people’s homes and compiling lists of men of conscript age, the paper reports.

As tensions between Russia and the West soar, with concerns of nuclear escalation at the fore, no less a global figure than Pope Francis is weighing in. At Vatican City on Sunday, he denounced the seventh-month-old war  as an “error and a horror” and appealed to Mr. Putin to “stop this spiral of violence and death” while directing “a similarly trusting appeal to the president of Ukraine to be open to serious proposals of peace.”

In emotional language generally absent from the public statements on the war by, say, Secretary of of State Blinken, the Pope also said that “it’s anguishing that the world is learning the geography of Ukraine through names like Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Izium, Zaporizhizhia and other places, that have become places of indescribable sufferings and fears.”

Elsewhere on Sunday, the former director of the CIA, David Petraeus, a retired four-star army general, did not do much to dial back anxieties over the possibility of Russia’s potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Speaking to ABC News, General Petraeus said, “Just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO — a collective — effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.”

While the former general spoke to the American public, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was in Turkey where he had a meeting with a top advisor to Mr. Zelensky, Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office. The White House said that the two discussed the situation at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant and food exports and that Washington’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity remains steadfast.