Russian troops today continued their attempts to regain the initiative in some sectors of the front in eastern Ukraine, while Kiev forces concentrated their attacks on enemy logistics routes in the south, which may be preparations for a new phase of their counteroffensive.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported on Monday that in the last three days its troops managed to advance 3 kilometers in a sector 11 kilometers wide on the Kupiansk front, in northwestern Ukraine.
Russian aviation and artillery hammered Ukrainian troops in the towns of Kupiansk, Kotliarovka and Berestove, in the Kharkov region, causing around 110 casualties, said the ministry’s spokesman, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov.
“All of last week the east was the epicenter of the fighting. The Kupiansk axis (northeast) was the hottest of all. The enemy tried to recover the positions lost last autumn,” said the deputy minister of Defense of Ukraine, Hanna Maliar, speaking on television.
According to Maliar, in the last seven days Russian troops spent almost half a million projectiles in eastern Ukraine in some 9,000 bombardments.
“Despite the intense artillery fire, our fighters continued offensive operations in the direction of Bakhmut,” the deputy minister said about the situation around that eastern city, captured last May by mercenaries from the Wagner Group with the support of troops. russian.
In the south, the Ukrainian Armed Forces continued to punish Russian positions and their supply routes, mainly in the south of the Kherson region, where the Crimean peninsula begins, annexed by Russia in 2014.
“The situation is fully under control,” Russia-imposed interim governor of the Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, said today, commenting on Ukrainian missile attacks on two bridges on the Perekop isthmus, which links the peninsula to the mainland.
“The land corridor through the Donetsk people’s republic is as safe as possible, and it is possible to move comfortably and quickly,” Pushilin told Russian state television.
In addition, Ukrainian forces attacked several towns in the southern Zaporizhia region, controlled by Russian troops, with artillery fire.
“In the past day the enemy opened fire 40 times against towns in the Zaporizhia region,” the governor installed by Moscow in that territory, Yevgueni Balitsky, wrote on Telegram today.
According to experts from the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the attacks on the bridges are part of a “Ukrainian blockade campaign aimed at preparing the ground for future counteroffensives.”
For Ukraine’s plans to recapture Crimea, it is vital to cut off the land corridor linking it to mainland Russia through the Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, as if successful, the peninsula’s supplies would depend almost exclusively on the Kerch bridge. , highly vulnerable.
This infrastructure, 18 kilometers long, which includes a railway bridge and another road, has been the object of at least two attacks that caused damage that altered its operation.
“It will be a hot autumn,” Russian political scientist Abbas Galliámov, a former speechwriter for Russian President Vladimir Putin, predicted in a YouTube live stream.
According to the expert, currently in exile and wanted by Moscow, the war is being won by Ukraine and the Kremlin needs a “new mobilization to break this trend.”
Galliámov argued that this is precisely the reason for the recent adoption of a series of laws that toughen the penalties for evading military service at a time when “the social base of the regime is shrinking like the skin of an onager.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project