Kyiv says it has pushed back Russian troops in east
UKRAINE said yesterday its forces had recaptured villages from Russian troops as it pressed on with a major counteroffensive in the northeast of the country that could signal a shift in the war’s momentum and jeopardise Russia’s main advance.
Tetiana Apatchenko, press officer for the 92nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, the main Ukrainian force near Kharkiv, confirmed that troops had recaptured Cherkaski Tyshky, Ruski Tyshki, Borshchova and Slobozhanske, in north of Kharkiv in recent days.
Yuriy Saks, an adviser to Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, said the successes were pushing Russian artillery out of range of parts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which has been under bombardment since the earliest days of the war.
“The military operations of the Ukrainian armed forces around Kharkiv, especially north and northeast of Kharkiv, are sort of a success story,” Saks said.
The counter-attack could signal a new phase in the war, with Ukraine going on the offensive after weeks in which Russia mounted a massive assault that Ukrainian troops mostly held off. By pushing back Russian forces who had occupied the outskirts of Kharkiv since the early days of the war, the Ukrainians are moving
into striking distance of the rear supply lines sustaining the main Russian attack force further south.
“They’re trying to cut in and behind the Russians to cut off the supply lines, because that’s really one of their (the Russians’) main weaknesses,” said Neil Melvin of the RUSI think-tank in London.
“Ukrainians are getting close to the Russian border. So all the gains that the Russians made in the early days in the northeast of Ukraine are increasingly slipping away.”
The setbacks near Kharkiv deal a
blow to Moscow’s war plans when Western leaders believed President Vladimir Putin had been hoping to present a victory for the commemoration of Russia’s WWII Victory Day on Monday.
Since Russia was forced to abandon its assault on Kyiv at the end of March, its main attack force has been trying to encircle Ukrainian troops in the eastern Donbas region. The Ukrainian forces have been holding out against assaults from three directions.
By pushing in north of Kharkiv, Ukraine could now try to turn the tables, and force Moscow to switch to trying to defend its own long supply lines, which stretch from the Russian border to the city of Izyum south of Kharkiv.
In the south, Russian forces were again pummelling the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol yesterday, trying to capture the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined city where Ukraine says tens of thousands of people have died during the two months of Russian siege and bombardment.
Scores of civilians have been evacuated from the steelworks in recent days, but an aide to Mariupol’s mayor, Petro Andryushchenko, said at least 100 people still remained inside.
Yesterday, Ukraine’s Azov Regiment in Azovstal, said on Telegram that in the past 24 hours, 34 Russian aircraft had flown over the plant including eight sorties by strategic bombers. It said the plant had come under fire from the Russian navy and from tanks, artillery fire and rockets. Russia has denied targeting civilians.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Ukraine yesterday and toured Bucha, the suburb north of Kyiv where Russian forces left behind hundreds of corpses of killed civilians when they withdrew at last month.
Baerbock was the first German cabinet minister to visit Ukraine since the start of the war, days or weeks after visits by senior officials from other Western countries. A visit from Germany had been controversial because Kyiv had openly rebuked Berlin for being slow to disavow years of close economic ties with Russia.
In addition to the heavy battles near the front, Russia is still using missiles to strike targets deep inside Ukraine. Firefighters battled blazes in Odesa until the early hours yesterday after Russian missiles struck the Black Sea port. One person was killed and five people were injured when seven missiles hit a shopping centre and a depot, Ukraine’s armed forces said on Facebook. Ukrainian emergency services said all the fires from the strikes were extinguished yesterday.
European Council President Charles Michel visited Odesa on Monday. His meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was interrupted by the missile attack. Their talks continued in a bomb shelter, according to Shmyhal’s official Twitter account.
The number of Ukrainians who have fled their country since Russia’s invasion on February 24 was approaching six million, according to the UN, which says the refugee crisis is the fastest growing since World War II.