Ukraine claims it has recaptured another village in the east.
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Ukraine’s military said on Monday that it had liberated an additional village near a string of small settlements along a river in eastern Ukraine, an area that has been at the epicenter of fighting as the counteroffensive to push back Russian forces takes shape.
The military said it had reclaimed the village of Storozhove early Monday, suggesting it had crossed the Mokri Yaly River from its positions in the village of Blahodatne, which Ukraine said it retook over the weekend. The combat with tanks, armored vehicles, howitzers, drones and infantry is happening on farmland near a small river that loops around the villages that appear to be changing hands in the fighting.
The progress, while small, appeared to be the third village that Ukraine’s military has recaptured from Russia in the past few days; the Ukrainian Volunteer Forces have also said they took one additional settlement.
Those advances would be a departure from the reports that emerged last week in the first few days of the counteroffensive, when Russian officials claimed that Ukrainian forces were taking heavy casualties and losing equipment newly donated by allies, including the United States. Ukraine did not dispute those claims of losses last week, even as it gave signals that the long-awaited push was underway.
It also appeared that flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine had not slowed the advance of Kyiv’s forces. Ukraine has accused Russia, which controls the dam, of destroying it. Engineers who have seen the evidence have said that the dam was probably destroyed by an explosion from the inside.
The Ukrainian military said on Monday that Russia had also blown up a dam on the Mokri Yaly River to thwart Ukrainian crossings. It was not clear which stretches of the river were affected.
In its early phases, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is likely to employ multiple probing attacks and feints, with the bulk of the attacking force held in reserve, military analysts have said. Ukraine has not disclosed losses, but its attacks against Russian trenches, dug across farm fields dense with mines, are likely to be taking a heavy toll on its forces, analysts say.
Progress is measured in yards, or at most a mile or so, and any success in the opening week of the offensive has been the recapture of tiny farming villages.
Still, the announcements have buoyed the mood of Ukrainians. Among soldiers interviewed on Sunday at cafes in the city of Zaporizhzhia after they came off the front, there was a sense of momentum in the early advances. But they also described intense artillery barrages from the Russians.
— Andrew E. Kramer
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