Ukraine forces gain on two fronts
Counteroffensive push in areas Russia wants
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces scored more gains in their counteroffensive across at least two fronts Monday, advancing in the very areas that Russia is trying to absorb and challenging Moscow’s effort to engage fresh troops and its threats to defend incorporated areas by all means.
In their latest breakthrough, Ukrainian forces penetrated Moscow’s defenses in the strategic southern Kherson region, one of the four areas in Ukraine that Russia is in the process of annexing.
Kyiv’s troops also consolidated gains in the east and other major battlefields, re-establishing Ukrainian control just as Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to overcome problems with manpower, weapons, troop morale and logistics, along with intensifying domestic and international criticism. Putin faces disarray and anger domestically about his partial troop mobilization and confusion about the establishment of new Russian borders.
Ukraine’s advances have become so apparent that even Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov, who usually focuses on his military’s successes and the enemy’s losses, was forced to acknowledge it.
“With numerically superior tank units in the direction of Zolota Balka and Oleksandrivka, the enemy managed to forge deep into our defenses,” Konashenkov said Monday, referring to two towns in the Kherson region. He coupled that with claims that Russian forces inflicted heavy losses on Ukraine’s military.
Ukrainian forces have struggled to retake the Kherson region due to its open terrain, in contrast to their successful breakout offensive in the northeast around the country’s second-largest city of Kharkiv that began last month.
Russia’s moves to incorporate the Ukrainian regions, as well as Putin’s effort to mobilize more troops, have been done so hastily that government officials have struggled to explain and implement them.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Donetsk and Luhansk are joining Russia with the same administrative borders that existed before a conflict erupted there in 2014 between pro-russian separatists and Ukrainian forces.
A Russian-installed official in the Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, acknowledged that the Ukrainian forces “have broken through a little deeper” but insisted that “everything is under control” and that Russia’s “defense system is working.”
Still, Russia claimed some success at pushing back while the Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, said Kyiv’s forces retook the village of Torske, 12 miles from the city of Kreminna.
Ukraine also has retaken Lyman, a strategic eastern city that the Russians had used as a key logistics and transport hub. Lyman is in the Donetsk region near the border with Luhansk.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’S nuclear watchdog, said Monday that director general of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — Europe’s largest — had been released from Russian custody.
Russian forces had blindfolded and detained Ihor Murashov on Friday for questioning.