Ukraine has opened a new phase of the war by recapturing five towns as part of the counteroffensive that began more than a week ago, which Russia is resisting by all means, including, according to Kiev, by blowing up a second dam .
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski kept his word that Kiev would no longer wait for Western weapons to launch the expected counterattack, although he has asked Germany for new batches of Leopard 2 tanks and Marder armored vehicles.
As both sides have recognized, the bloodiest fighting is taking place in the Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions, something from which the flooded Kherson is getting rid of, impassable at the moment due to flooding from the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.
To the two villages liberated over the weekend in Donetsk -Blahodatne and Neskuchne-, two other bastions controlled by the troops in the same region -Storozhove and Makarovke- and a fifth in Zaporizhia (Novodarivka) were added today.
“The flag is waving again in Storozhove. And the same will happen with all the towns until we liberate all the Ukrainian territory,” proclaimed the marines from the port of Odessa, who would have killed fifty Russian soldiers, four of whom were taken prisoner.
In the case of Zaporizhia, controlled 80% by the Russians, the objective of the operation is to reach the Azov, turned into an inland sea by Moscow, and recover the ports of Mariupol and Berdiansk. In addition, kyiv has also announced advances by its troops on the flanks of Bakhmut, a city that it lost a month ago at the hands of Wagner’s mercenaries.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Ukraine could also have achieved territorial gains near Velika Novosilka (Donetsk) and around Orijiv, a town that leads to the main Russian-controlled Zaporizhia city, Melitopol.
Russia today admitted to using assault helicopters and drones to slow down the Ukrainian advance on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia. Last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin proudly assured that all the Ukrainian offensive attempts had “failed”, but acknowledged that kyiv retained its “offensive potential”. He was right in the last assessment of him.
Meanwhile, Russia, which celebrated its national day on Monday amid tight security for fear of Ukrainian drones, stood by. The Russian Defense Ministry insisted in its daily report that its troops have repulsed up to five enemy attacks in the Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions, where kyiv reportedly lost hundreds of men. According to Defense, the most intense hostilities take place around the strongholds of Márinka and Avdíivka, on the outskirts of the regional capital of Donetsk.
“For more than a week they (Russian soldiers) have successfully repelled the counter-offensive of the bloody NATO-backed Kiev regime,” Viacheslav Volodin, chairman of the Duma, or chamber of deputies, wrote on Telegram.
Instead, according to the Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister, Hanna Maliar, the Russian Army would have been forced to mobilize troops stationed in Kherson towards the Donetsk and Zaporizhia area. In addition, kyiv today accused Moscow of blowing up a new dam, this time in Donetsk, in order to stop enemy attacks.
“The occupants have blown up a dam on the Mokri Yaly river, causing flooding on both banks of the river,” said Ukrainian army spokesman for the Tavria region, Valeri Shershen. Of course, the destruction of the dam, which is located near the border with Zaporizhia, “does not affect the offensive operations” of Ukraine in the area, he added.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project