Ukraine is attacking along a 600-mile front as it grapples with the flood crisis
Ukrainian and Russian forces clashed on Saturday along a 600-mile stretch of frontline as Ukrainian rescuers searched for survivors in the foul-smelling floodwaters even as Russia continued to bomb evacuation points and coastal communities.
The Ukrainian military, which closely monitors battlefield information, only gave wide credit to the skirmishes unfolding along the front Friday night into Saturday. According to military analysts, it appeared that Ukraine was trying to break through Russian lines at several locations in the south and east, near the towns of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region and Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave the strongest confirmation yet that the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-attack had begun, saying on Saturday that “counter-offensive and defensive actions are being taken in Ukraine. At what stage I will not reveal in detail. I think we will definitely will feel.”
He made the remarks during a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who arrived in Kiev on Saturday for an unannounced visit to show his support for Ukraine.
In the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces with rockets and artillery hit four Russian command centers, six concentration areas of personnel, weapons and military equipment, three ammunition depots and five enemy artillery units in firing positions, the Ukrainian military said. The claims could not be independently verified.
In the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian troops have advanced about a mile to some parts of the frontline, the army said on Saturday. month.
The aim was to take advantage of a rotation of Russian units in the area, Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, the spokesman for the eastern military command, told local television. He said the Ukrainian army has attacked Russian forces near Bakhmut six times in the past 24 hours.
He did not specify where Ukraine had advanced and his claims could not be independently verified.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had successfully repelled all attacks and had no comment on the situation surrounding Bakhmut.
Russian forces also targeted Ukrainian towns and cities far from the front, firing rockets and drones at the port city of Odessa on Friday evening. The Ukrainian military said air defenses shot down all eight drones aimed at the city, but debris from the weapons fell on a nine-story apartment building, killing at least three people and injuring about two dozen others, including who has a pregnant wife and two children.
The Ukrainian army said it also shot down two of three rockets aimed at the city, but one hit the coast, injuring at least three people.
Tuesday’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam has triggered a massive flood of water that has swept through dozens of towns and villages in southern Ukraine. without access to clean drinking water. That has left Ukraine facing one of Europe’s worst environmental and economic disasters in decades as it embarks on its most ambitious and strategically critical military campaign of the war.
In the city of Kherson, floodwaters receded “little by little,” Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the regional military administration, said in a video statement.
About 35 villages and more than 3,700 homes in Ukrainian-controlled territory were still under water, he said, adding that the situation in Russian-occupied towns and villages in low-lying areas on the eastern bank remains dangerous.
At least 27 people in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region are missing, Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s interior minister, said in a statement. More than 2,600 people have been evacuated, he said, including 160 children.
Even as rescue efforts were underway, Russian forces shelled settlements in Ukrainian-occupied parts of the Kherson region 41 times on Friday, wounding at least four people, including a child. The contents of cemeteries in two villages were swept into the sea, he said, adding to the toxic swirl of debris and munitions that washed up on shores in southern Ukraine.
As a precaution, Ukraine’s Nuclear Energy Agency has “cold shut down” the last working reactor at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which relies on water from the reservoir for cooling. The plant is not in immediate danger, the agency Energoatom added.
Concerns have grown that the floodwaters could be a breeding ground for disease, but Ukraine’s health ministry said social media reports of a cholera epidemic were false. The ministry said it would nevertheless step up epidemiological surveillance and increase supplies of necessary medicines in the region.
Bacterial diseases such as cholera and dysentery pose a risk to people in the flooded areas, particularly those with limited access to clean water, but the ministry said the situation was under control for now.
The effects of the loss of the reservoir were also felt beyond the flood plain, as it was the main source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in the region. More than 89,000 customers in the Dnipro area were without water, Ukraine’s interior ministry said on Saturday.
As they grapple with the immediate humanitarian crisis, Ukrainian officials are trying to assess the long-term consequences of the dam’s destruction, which threatens to leave hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland without adequate irrigation, further devastating Ukraine’s agricultural industry and exacerbating a global food crisis. .
The Kakhovka irrigation system – the largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world – supplied essential water to more than 617,000 hectares of agricultural land in Ukraine’s arid southern steppes. That is now lost, he said report of the Ukrainian State Recreation and Fisheries Agency which was released Friday.
In addition, the report said, water resources will be cut off for irrigation systems that served another 1.2 million acres of farmland that allowed the cultivation of a wide variety of crops before the invasion, such as corn, soybeans, canola, wheat, eggplant, onions , peppers and cucumbers.
The United Nations’ top aid official, Under-Secretary-General Martin Griffiths, said in an interview Friday that the long-term consequences of the dam collapse and flooding were “extremely dire” and would affect global food supplies.
Ukraine is a leading grain exporter and the sharp drop in exports caused by the war has raised food security concerns for millions of people around the world. After the dam collapsed last week, world prices for wheat and corn rose on fears about Ukraine’s ability to continue growing food for Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
As Ukrainian leaders struggle to get a clear picture of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in southern Ukraine – an effort made more difficult by the fact that the Russians do not allow independent observers and humanitarian organizations to operate in the area they control – Moscow and Kiev fought on a different front in the war: information and control of the war story.
Hanna Maliar, a deputy defense minister of Ukraine, said war always brings losses, including “the most terrible, but unavoidable losses” of human life. But she said “the current wars take place in two dimensions – real and informative.”
Some accused the Russians of exaggerating battlefield successes. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that “Russian information space prematurely claimed that the Ukrainian counter-offensive had failed after Russian forces damaged more Ukrainian military equipment supplied by the West on June 9.”
President Vladimir V. Putin, in rare comments about developments on the battlefield, said fighting had been going on for five days, claiming that Ukrainian forces “did not achieve their objectives in any battle zone”.
Putin’s willingness to discuss the counteroffensive “may indicate that the Kremlin is learning from its previous failed approach to rhetorically downplaying successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in 2022,” the ISW analysts said.
Ms Maliar warned that Russia often releases inflated figures in the hope of extracting valuable information from Ukraine’s attempts to refute them.
“It is necessary to understand that we also fight with information, just like the enemy,” she said.
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.