Ukraine on Monday claimed small gains in its counter-offensive in the country’s southeast, chasing a place to drive a wedge through Russian defenses, a key to its hopes of retaking large chunks of territory lost last year. had gone through the Russian invasion.
After a week of heavy fighting with infantry, artillery and tanks, in a predominantly agricultural landscape, the Ukrainian armed forces, newly armed and trained by Western allies, have seven recaptured small villages and settlements, Hannah Malyar, a deputy defense minister, wrote on the Telegram messaging platform, including one the military said it captured Monday.
The deepest advance was about 4 miles, and “the area taken under control is 90 square miles,” about 35 square miles, she wrote.
The significance of those gains remains to be seen, and military analysts have said it will last weeks or months, not days, to gauge its success the offensive Ukraine started over much of the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions last week. Progress is measured in yards, or at most a mile or so, Ukrainian gains have been in small farming villages and there has been no sign of a significant breach in the dense defensive network of the Russian occupiers so far.
Ukraine’s multiple counter-offensive is likely to use probing attacks and feints, keeping most of the strike force in reserve, military analysts have said, looking for a weakness and then throwing their weight in that direction. Ukraine has not announced any losses, but its attacks on Russian trenches, bunkers, minefields and gun emplacements are likely to take a heavy toll on its forces, analysts say, and there have been some confirmed losses of both troops and advanced weapons recently donated by allies.
It appeared that flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine had not slowed the advance of Kiev troops, who have not attempted to cross the river. Ukraine has accused Russia, which controlled the dam, of destroying it. Engineering and ordnance experts have said the dam was probably broken by an explosion from the insidenot by shelling or other external attacks, and not by structural failure.
The armies may not have been badly affected, but the collapse of the dam before dawn on June 6 was devastating for many thousands of civilians, flooding their homes and workplaces and forcing them to flee. For those left behind, the river, the heart of the region’s economy, has been polluted with debris and toxic chemicals, flooding sewers and polluting drinking water systems. More than a dozen people have died and dozens more are missing.
The destruction of the dam also drained the reservoir behind it, an essential source of water for towns and farms upstream and to keep the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant safely cooled. The Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection said this on Monday more than 72 percent of the reservoir’s water had been lost.
Kryvyi Rih, a steel and mining town of 630,000, about 130 kilometers north of the dam, on Monday ordered residents to cut water consumption by 40 percent. Otherwise, nearly three-quarters of the city, largely dependent on the depleted reservoir, will run out of drinking water within weeks, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city administration. In the surrounding Dnipro region, officials said 89,000 people were already without clean water, as were thousands more downstream.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a speech to the nation on Sunday evening, lashed out at Russia for the dam’s destruction, saying representatives of the International Criminal Court had visited the region and “heard the consequences of this Russian act of terrorism with their own eyes and for themselves.” that the Russian terror continues.” The court did not immediately confirm the visit.
The Director General of the United Nations Nuclear Watchdog, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said Monday that he was on his way to Ukraine to assess the situation at the Zaporizhzhia factory, which is held by Russian troops, and that he would meet Mr. Zelensky.
The plant’s six reactors have been shut down, but even in that state it “needs access to water and power for cooling and other essential safety and security functions and to avoid the risk of a potential fuel meltdown and release of radioactive material.” said the statement. International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement.
Mr Grossi, who heads the agency, said over the weekend that while there was no imminent threat of catastrophe – the plant can rely on water from an adjoining pond for several months – the agency was urgently seeking new data on falling water levels in the reservoir. He said there were differences in water level readings at different locations.
The Zaporizhzhia power station, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, was seized Russian troops shortly after the start of the large-scale invasion of Moscow in February last year. Ukraine controls the other side of the river.
Shelling and gunfire have hit the factory several times, and Ukrainian officials say the remaining staff are dangerously exhausted, overworked and mistreated. In addition, Ukraine’s counter-offensive raises the possibility of more intense fighting nearby that could damage the country.
The Ukrainian military said on Monday that Russia had also blown up a dam in the much smaller Mokri Yaly River in the east to thwart Ukraine’s crossing. It was not clear which parts of the river were affected.
Some of Ukraine’s alleged claims are concentrated along the Mokri Yaly, southwest of the city of Velyka Novosilka, in the Donetsk region. The Ukrainian army and a volunteer force fighting alongside the army have reported taking several small towns there on both sides of the river, including the settlement of Storozhove on Monday.
In addition, there has been heavy fighting, and some claims of incremental Ukrainian advance, along an arc of more than 150 miles, from Bakhmut, to the northeast, to near the town of Kamianske, on the Dnipro, in the Zaporizhzhia region to the west.
A video posted online Monday and verified by The Times shows Ukrainian troops posing with a Ukrainian flag and walking around Storozhove. In another video verified by The Times, posted on Sunday, Ukrainian soldiers place a flag in a damaged building in Blahodatne, a village across the river.
These videos and others are posted on the social media accounts of the Ukrainian units involved in the operation in an apparent attempt to announce the recapture of each village. While the videos show Ukrainian forces seemingly operating freely in any location, it is not clear exactly how much control they have established. In several videos, apparent explosions and small arms fire can be heard in the background.
Despite the modesty of the claims, they have boosted the mood of Ukrainians. Among the soldiers who were interviewed in cafes in the city of Zaporizhzhia on Sunday after coming from the front, there was a sense of momentum in the early advance. But they also described intense artillery barrages from the Russians.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London, Marc Santora from Kiev, Ukraine, and Hayley Willis from Seoul.