MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian troops have taken control of a village in eastern Ukraine which is close to a lithium deposit after fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces, a Russian-backed official said on Thursday.
The village of Shevchenko is located in Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions – in addition to Crimea – that Moscow has claimed as its own territory in annexations that Kyiv and Western powers reject as illegal.
The Russian Defence Ministry announced earlier on Thursday that Shevchenko had been taken along with another settlement called Novoserhiivka.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield report and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed Shevchenko under Russian control.
Soviet geologists who discovered the lithium deposit there in 1982 suggested it could be significant. It sits at a depth that would allow commercial mining, and Russian-backed officials have suggested it will be developed when the situation permits.
“The village of Shevchenko, which is located on the border with the Dnipropetrovsk region, is another settlement that has a lithium deposit. This was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian armed forces sent a huge number of their soldiers to hold it,” Igor Klimakovsky, a Russian-appointed official in Donetsk, was cited by the state TASS news agency as saying on Thursday.
The Ukrainian Geological Survey says the deposit is located on Shevchenko’s eastern outskirts and covers an area of nearly 40 hectares.
Parts of the Russian press incorrectly claimed in January that the Shevchenko deposit had already been captured, confusing it with the seizure of another settlement of the same name elsewhere.
Lithium is a coveted global resource because of its use in a host of industries and technologies from mobile phones to electric cars. Ukraine has reserves of about 500,000 tons, and Russia has double that, according to U.S. government estimates.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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