Ukraine said on Friday (June 9) that the epicenter of the fighting remained the east of the country, as clashes in the south revived speculation about the start of the major counter-offensive that Kiev had promised for months .

“The situation remains tense along the entire front line. The epicenter is in the east,” Ganna Maliar, Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister, said on Telegram. “The enemy continues to concentrate its efforts in the direction of Lyman, Bakhmout, Avdiivka and Manrinka,” she added, citing the names of towns where fighting has been raging for months.

Regarding southern Ukraine, it remained elusive, while since Thursday the fighting has increased in intensity in the Zaporizhia region, according to Moscow, particularly around Orikhiv in the direction of Tokmak, a city 40 kilometers south of territory occupied by Russia. “The enemy is carrying out defensive actions in the Zaporizhia sector. Positional fights continue there,” Ganna Maliar simply commented.

For months Ukraine has been preparing a major counter-offensive to retake the territories occupied by Russia in the south and east. The resumption of fighting in the South is for many observers an indicator that it is in progress or imminent.

According to Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for Russian public television who maintains a Telegram channel followed by more than a million people, the Russian and Ukrainian “artillery” is at work, with troops from Kiev being, according to him, at the ‘offensive. “Long and hard fighting is going on,” he wrote in the morning. “The enemy is making incredible efforts, [carrying out] attacks. In vain. Ours hold. The front line is preserved, “he assured, unverifiable claims from independent sources at this stage.

The day before, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said his men had repelled a Ukrainian offensive in the Zaporizhia region overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, without giving a specific location. According to Dmitry Rogozin, a senior Russian official, the Moscow army “repelled the first attack”. “But the enemy has not yet introduced its main forces”, he tempered, while Ukraine would have gathered “600 tanks” in the area according to him.

A Ukrainian military success in this area of ??Zaporizhia would break the land bridge linking Russia to the annexed Crimean peninsula. This would be a major setback for Moscow. But the Russian army has in recent months reinforced its lines in the region, including digging kilometers of trenches and preparing for a major assault by Ukrainian forces.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has appeared to test Russian positions along the front line, from south to east, a way experts say to fuel uncertainty before launching an assault to retake territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea annexed in 2014. Moscow swears for its part to want to take the whole of Donbass in the east of the country.

On the Russian side of the border, three people were slightly injured on Friday when a drone fell on a building in Voronezh, some 200 km from the border with Ukraine. Russia has been the target for weeks of an increasing number of drone attacks that Moscow blames on Ukrainian forces.

In the regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv, flooding caused by Tuesday’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam killed at least 13 people: eight in areas under Russian occupation, and five in those under Ukrainian control, where authorities also report thirteen missing. “According to forecasts, the rising waters may last another ten days,” Vladimir Saldo, head of the occupied part of the region, said on Telegram. “The water has already entered the houses and the streets. Every two hours, I go out to see if the water is still rising,” Tatiana Ioenko, a resident of Chornobaivka, told AFP.

In the city of Kherson itself, however, the water level began to drop “for the first time” since Tuesday, according to Laura Moussiyan of the local meteorological agency. “For hundreds of thousands of people in many towns and villages, access to drinking water is severely hampered,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram the day after a trip to the area.

The dam’s water level “has dropped by 4.7m” since Tuesday, the dam’s Ukrainian operator, Ukrhydroenergo, warned, but according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Thursday evening, it continues to cool the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, located 150 km upstream.

kyiv and Moscow accused each other of the destruction of the dam, then of strikes on the areas where evacuation operations are taking place in Kherson. EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said on Friday that “everything seemed to indicate” that Russia was behind the destruction of this infrastructure.

Norway, for its part, announced the release of 13 million euros for southern Ukraine.