Russia assured this Saturday that its troops maintain their positions and repel the attempts of the Ukrainian forces to gain ground in an offensive that, according to Kiev, advances at a slow pace due to the staggered defense of the Russians and their minefields.

The spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, stated this Saturday that in the last 24 hours the Russian Army caused the enemy up to 600 casualties on different fronts.

As for several weeks, the Russian daily report does not mention its own progress on the ground and limits itself to listing the repulsed Ukrainian attacks and the targets hit by aircraft and artillery in the Ukrainian rear, which confirms that the Ukrainian troops have made with the initiative of the actions.

Konashenkov indicated that in the past day the Ukrainian forces launched a total of fifteen attacks on the Donetsk front, including the Bakhmut area, all of which were repelled by the Russian forces.

In those battles, he added, the Ukrainian Armed Forces suffered more than 265 casualties and lost one tank, two infantry tanks, eight cars, two Msta-B howitzers and one D-20 cannon-howitzer.

The military spokesman pointed out that on the Zaporizhia front, in southern Ukraine, Russian troops repelled attacks near the towns of Piatijatki and Luhivske, in which the Ukrainians lost up to 140 troops, three armored vehicles, three howitzers and seven cars.

As the commander of the Ukrainian military group on the Tavria (south) front, General Olexandr Tarnavskyi, wrote today on his Telegram channel, the troops under his command “advance” and attack with missiles and artillery fire

“The enemy’s losses between dead and wounded amount to almost two companies (around 200 troops),” said Tarnavskyi, who specified that during the past day his missile and artillery units fired 1,201 shots

The advance in the south, towards the city of Melitopol, currently controlled by Russian troops, is key to one of the main objectives of the Ukrainian Army, which is to cut the land corridor that Russia opened towards the Crimean peninsula as soon as its campaign began. military in Ukraine.

According to kyiv, the interruption of this supply route is essential to recover the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.

The President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, reiterated in a joint press conference with the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, that negotiations with Russia will be possible only after the country recovers the borders it had in 1991, when it gained independence from the Soviet Union, including Crimea.

In Moscow while, a week after the failed rebellion of the Wagner mercenary company, the biggest challenge posed to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the almost quarter century that he has been in power is still being digested.

The head of the Kremlin, who since the pandemic reduced his personal contacts to a minimum, abandoned sanitary precautions and displayed intense public activity, including a mass bath, after the dismantling of the riot led by the head of the Wagnerites, Yevgueni Prigozhin.

A week after Wagner’s chief ordered his columns, which were practically at the gates of Moscow without encountering resistance, numerous questions remain unresolved, the main one being: the reason for the passivity of the Armed Forces in the face of the attack against the constitutional order.

Prigozhin, who after being accused of treason was surprisingly pardoned and sent to Belarus, was pursuing the removal of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, whom he blames for the setbacks in Ukraine.

It is unknown to what extent this assessment is shared by members of the Russian high command, but the affinity of the Wagner chief with Colonel General Sergei Surovikin, deputy commander of the military campaign in Ukraine, who has disappeared from the public scene since last Saturday, is known. .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project