UKRAINE: Ukrainian forces are reportedly recapturing towns along the west bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine on Monday, with Moscow forced to yield territory along a second major front line just days after claiming to have seized it.
The scale of the Ukrainian’s advances was unclear, with Kyiv maintaining all but complete silence about the situation in the area. But several Russian military bloggers reported sighting a Ukrainian tank advance through dozens of kilometres of territory along the river bank.
In one of the rare comments by a Ukrainian official on the situation, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior ministry, posted what he said was a video of a Ukrainian soldier waving a flag in Zolota Balka, downriver from the former front line.
Moreover, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think-tank, Rob Lee, cited Russian bloggers as reporting that their forces were falling back as far as Dudchany- 40 km (25 miles) downriver from where they had opposed Ukrainian troops a day earlier.
“When these many Russian channels are sounding the alarm, it usually means they’re in trouble,” he wrote on Twitter.
A Ukrainian advance encompassing the region along the Dnipro river could entrap thousands of Russian troops on the far side, cutting off all supplies. The river is enormously wide, and Ukraine has already bombed or damaged crucial and major crossings.
The reports were the first to describe a rapid Ukrainian advance in the south of the country since the war began, and come just a day after Ukraine expelled Russian forces from a major bastion, Lyman, on the opposite end of the front in the east.
Meanwhile, in other major developments in the war which continue to see many breakthroughs, Ukrainian forces have achieved great success with their rapid and rigorous counter-offensive measures in the north of the Kherson region.
Zelensky’s forces have secured their positions in Zolota Balka and Kreshchenivka. According to Russian sources, Ukrainian forces also liberated Shevchenkivka and Lyubymivka, so that forces can advance further to new defensive positions around Mykolaivka, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Amid several reports of Ukrainian successes overcoming red forces by a huge margin, some reports suggest Putin’s ‘partial mobilisation’ agenda has backfired as tens and thousands of Russian men called for mandatory military conscription, and are fleeing abroad.
Mikhail Degtyarev, governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia’s the Far East, said around half of the men called up there had been found unfit for duty and sent back home. He fired the region’s military commissar.
The fall of Lyman in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which emerges just hours after Putin declared his annexation, is a huge win-win for Ukraine whose forces get more leverage to strike deeper into Russian-occupied territory and sever Russian supply networks.
“Thanks to the successful operation in Lyman we are moving towards the second north-south route … and that means a second supply line will be disrupted,” said reserve colonel Viktor Kevlyuk at Ukraine’s Centre for Defence Strategies think-tank.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky boldly claimed that the Lyman success was not a solitary win for the country.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defence, Llyod Austin, acknowledged that there had been “a kind of change in the dynamics of the battlefield.” Austin claimed the Ukrainian wins were attributed to the military finesse of the Ukrainian military and its suave and smart utilisation of weapons supplied by the US and NATO allies.
He also added that the Ukrainian military has used “technologies like HIMARS” and used them “in the right way” to “attack warehouses, command, and control, which robs the Russian Federation of significant capabilities.”
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