AFP
Kyiv said Wednesday its forces had liberated the settlement of Urozhaine in the industrial Donetsk region as part of a grinding push to wrest Russian forces along the southern front in Ukraine.
“Urozhaine was liberated. Our defenders are entrenched at the outskirts. The offensive continues,” Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Malyar announced in a statement on social media.
Kyiv launched its long anticipated counteroffensive in June, but has acknowledged tough battles as it struggles to break through heavily fortified Russian positions.
Malyar’s announcement comes one day after Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said that Ukraine’s military resources were “almost exhausted”, despite receiving arms deliveries from Western allies.
There was no immediate response to the Ukrainian claim from Moscow, which has repeatedly downplayed Kyiv’s offensive capabilities.
The Donetsk region — which has faced the brunt of fighting in recent months — is one of four Ukrainian regions that the Kremlin claimed to have annexed last year, months after invading in February.
Its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko announced on Wednesday morning that four people had been killed and another seven injured in the region by Russian forces over the past 24 hours.
Urozhaine, with an estimated pre-war population of around 1,000 people, is among a cluster of villages that Ukrainian forces have been attempting to wrest over recent weeks.
Further east in the region, Ukrainian forces have also been fighting to push back Russian forces from the north and south of the war-battered town of Bakhmut.
The town of some 70,000 people was captured in May after a months-long and brutal battle but immediately Ukrainian forces began clawing back ground around its flanks.
Separately, Ukraine said Wednesday that Russian drones had damaged grain facilities at a port in the southern region of Odesa — a key hub for exports since the collapse of a deal with Russia allowing for exports from the Black Sea.
“As a result of enemy strikes on one of the Danube ports, warehouses and granaries were damaged,” the Odesa regional governor Oleg Kiper announced on social media, saying the Black Sea territory had suffered two waves of drone attacks.
The Ukrainian air force said it had downed 13 drones overnight in the southern regions of Odeas and Mykolaiv regions.
Attacks have multiplied on both sides of the Black Sea since Russia exited the agreement protecting grain exports there, brokered by the UN and Turkey.
And Russia announced that its air defence systems had downed several drones overnight near the capital, in the latest of a string of aerial attacks that have targeted Russia’s urban centres.
The defence ministry said three drones were shot down in the Kaluga region south of the capital, while regional officials said there was no damage or casualties.
The air attack is at least the fifth this month over the Kaluga region that Russia says it has thwarted.
