Ukraine forces break through Russian defences in south, advance in east
and Tom Balmforth
Ukrainians ride an armoured vehicle, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Donesk region, Ukraine, October 3 2022. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
SVIATOHIRSK/KYIV, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian defencesin the south of the country while expanding their rapid offensive in the east, seizing back more territory in areas annexed by Russia and threatening its troops' supply lines.
Making their biggest breakthrough in the south since the war began, Ukrainian forces recaptured several villages in an advance along the strategic Dnipro River on Monday, Ukrainian officials and a Russian-installed leader in the area said.
Ukrainian forces in the south destroyed 31 Russian tanks and one multiple rocket launcher, the military's southern operational command said in a nightly update, without providing details of where the fighting occurred.
Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield accounts.
The southern breakthrough mirrors recent Ukrainian advances in the east even as Russia has tried to raise the stakes by annexing land, ordering mobilisation, and threatening nuclear retaliation.
Ukraine has made significant advances in two of the four Russian-occupied regions Moscow last week annexed after what it called referendums - votes that were denounced by Kyiv and Western governments as illegal and coercive.
In a sign Ukraine is building momentum on the eastern front, Reuters saw columns of Ukrainian military vehicles heading on Monday to reinforce the rail hub of Lyman, retaken at the weekend, and a staging post to press into the Donbas region.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine's army had seized back towns in a number of areas, without giving details.
"New population centres have been liberated in several regions. Heavy fighting is going on in several sectors of the front," Zelenskiy said in a video address.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk - one of two regions that make up the Donbas - said Russian forces had taken over a psychiatric hospital in the town of Svatovo, a target en route to recapturing the major cities of Lysychansk and Sivierodonetsk.
"There is quite a network of underground rooms in the building and they have taken up defensive positions," he told Ukrainian television.
In the south, Ukrainian troops recaptured the town of Dudchany along the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects the country, Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed leader in occupied parts of Ukraine's Kherson province, told Russian state television.
"There are settlements that are occupied by Ukrainian forces," Saldo said.
Dudchany is about 30 km (20 miles) south of where the front stood before Monday's breakthrough, indicating the fastest advance of the war in the south. Russian forces there had been dug into heavily reinforced positions along a mainly static front line since the early weeks of the invasion.
While Ukraine has yet to give a full account of the developments, military and regional officials did release some details.
Soldiers from Ukraine's 128th Mountain Assault Brigade raised the blue and yellow national flag in Myrolyubivka, a village between the former front and the Dnipro, according to a video released by the defence ministry.
Serhiy Khlan, a Kherson regional council member, listed four other villages recaptured or where Ukrainian troops had been photographed.
"It means that our armed forces are moving powerfully along the banks of the Dnipro nearer to Beryslav," he said.
Russian missiles struck the northeastern city of Kharkiv killing a woman, its governor said on a messaging service, while Ukraine's General Staff said Russian reinforcements were arriving from Siberia and Syria.
Reuters was unable to verify the developments.
'ABILITY TO ATTACK'
The southern advance is targeting supply lines for as many as 25,000 Russian troops on the Dnipro's west bank. Ukraine has already destroyed the river's main bridges, forcing Russian forces to use makeshift crossings.
A substantial advance down river could cut them off entirely.
"The fact we have broken through the front means that ... the Russian army has already lost the ability to attack, and today or tomorrow it could lose the ability to defend," said Oleh Zhdanov, a military analyst based in Kyiv.
Ukraine appears to be on course to achieve several of its battlefield objectives, giving it "a much better defensive position to ride out what probably will be a tamping down of the hot fighting over the winter", Celeste Wallander, a senior Pentagon official, said on Monday.
Just hours after a concert on Moscow's Red Square on Friday where Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be Russian territory forever, Ukraine recaptured Lyman, the main Russian bastion in the north of Donetsk province.
Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday asked Twitter users to weigh in on a plan to end the war which included proposing U.N.-supervised elections in the four occupied regions and recognising Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014, as Russian.
The plan drew immediate condemnation from Ukrainians, including Zelenskiy. read more
Russia's flagging fortunes have led to a shift in mood on state media, where talkshow hosts have been acknowledging setbacks and searching for scapegoats.
"For a certain period of time, things won't be easy for us. We shouldn't be expecting good news right now," said Vladimir Solovyov, the most prominent presenter on state television.
The commander of Russia's western military district, which borders Ukraine, has lost his job, Russian media reported, the latest top official to be fired after defeats.
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The New York Times, Kyiv Oct. 4, 2:47 p.m.
Moscow Oct. 4, 2:47 p.m.
Russia-Ukraine WarZelensky Promises Fair Treatment of Ukrainians in Reclaimed Territory
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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is seeking to reassure Ukrainians living in territory the country has reclaimed that they would be treated fairly.
“Our approach has always been and remains clear and fair: If a person did not serve the occupiers and did not betray Ukraine, then there is no reason to consider such a person a collaborator,” Mr. Zelensky said Monday in his nightly speech.
The question of what constitutes collaboration is not always clear cut, with many activities intertwined with daily life.
Russia still partly controls four regions of Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — a territory larger than Portugal. Including areas that Russian forces and their proxies seized in 2014, Moscow controls about one-sixth of Ukrainian territory. Additionally, an untold number of Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia.
“Hundreds of thousands of our people were in the temporarily occupied territory,” Mr. Zelensky said on Monday. “Many helped our military and special services. Many simply tried to survive and waited for the return of the Ukrainian flag.”
Mr. Zelensky assured them that his government was focused on getting their lives back to normal as soon as possible by restoring necessities like transportation and postal services.
“Life is returning,” he added. “It is returning wherever the occupiers were driven out.”
He also took the chance to capitalize on reports of anger in Russia over President Vladimir V. Putin’s conscription order. He said his military officers were confronting troops ill-prepared to wage war.
“We can already see those who were taken just a week or two ago,” Mr. Zelensky said. “People were not trained for combat; they have no experience to fight in such a war. But the Russian command just needs some people — any kind — to replace the dead.”
The military draft Mr. Putin ordered on Sept. 21 to bolster his battered forces has set off nationwide turmoil and protest, bringing the war home to many Russians who had felt untouched by it. Many men have been drafted who were supposed to be ineligible based on factors like age or disability.
On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the far east said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region’s military commissar had been dismissed.
Moscow still holds the advantage in firepower and has threatened the use of a nuclear weapon to defend what it now calls Russian territory, and it has demonstrated repeatedly that it can rain destruction on Ukraine.
PISKY-RADKIVSKI, Ukraine — The Russian soldier lay in the undergrowth, slammed against a tree. Still in full combat uniform with body armor and boots, he had been missed by the crews gathering the dead.
A week after Ukrainian troops seized back the village of Pisky-Radkivski, in the Kharkiv region, in a sweeping counteroffensive that forced Russian troops into retreat across northeastern Ukraine, the horror of war was all too evident.
“I cannot breathe in my house from the smell,” said Valentina Eliseeva, 73, a bent woman in slippers who pointed out where the soldier’s corpse lay. “The smell is so bad. When will they take it away?”
The successful counteroffensive in northeastern Ukraine has reclaimed vast areas of territory, including Lyman, a crucial railway hub about 25 miles south of Pisky-Radkivski in Donetsk — one of the four regions of Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said last week his country was annexing and treating as its own. On Monday, Russian forces were still on the retreat in the northeast while Ukrainian forces also reported progress in the south — adding to the Kremlin’s embarrassments as it faces unusually public criticism of its war effort at home.
The battle lasted just one day in Pisky-Radkivski, but the power and accuracy of the Ukrainian assault was evident. Burned-out tanks sat still in their positions, at a crossroads and in the woods at the northern edge of the village. Russian uniforms, sleeping bags and rations lay abandoned among the fir trees opposite Ms. Eliseeva’s house.
Ukrainian artillery knocked out the tanks and killed at least eight Russian soldiers here, said Anatolii, 52, a retired engineer whose house was damaged in the strikes. “It is a strategic crossroads,” he said. “They shelled all around us.”
Most of the bodies had been removed by professional crews who tour the battle zone in white vans emblazoned with a red cross and the number 200, the code the military has used since Soviet times for cargo of dead soldiers. But they had not picked up the body by the tree, which was missing its head.
On a road past several villages to the south, a forensic team was picking up Russian bodies at the scene of an ambush. A Ukrainian soldier protested, but the forensic team explained quietly that Russian bodies could be exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers. The soldier helped lift a decomposed body into a black body bag, then leaned over to retch in the grass.
Down the road, soldiers from a Ukrainian tank crew pulled up near the body of another dead Russian soldier, who lay twisted where he had fallen, his face blackened and his body swollen.
Weary and dirty, the tank crew showed little concern for the Russian bodies, but seemed tense and angry from their recent battles. They had been fighting for 51 days without a break and were still wearing their summer uniforms, said one of them, who gave his code name as Positiv.
“We liberated four villages and planted the Ukrainian flag, but other units took the credit,” he said. “So many of our soldiers died,” he added. “So many young guys, 20-year-olds. So many.”
The State of the War
- Annexation Push: After Moscow’s proxies conducted a series of sham referendums in the Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk, President Vladimir V. Putin declared the four territories to be part of Russia. Western leaders, including President Biden in the United States, denounced the annexation as illegal.
- Retreat From Key City: Russian forces withdrew from the strategically important city of Lyman, in Donetsk Province, on Oct. 1. The retreat was a significant setback for Moscow, coming just a day after Mr. Putin declared the region to be Russian territory.
- Putin’s Nuclear Threats: For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, top Russian leaders are making explicit nuclear threats and officials in Washington are gaming out scenarios should Mr. Putin decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon.
- Russia’s Draft: The Kremlin has acknowledged that its new military draft is rife with problems, as protests have erupted across Russia, recruitment centers have been attacked and thousands of men have left the country.
