Ukraine appears to make a small gain in the south as counter-offensive continues

KYIV – Ukrainian forces have retaken a small village in the south of the country, a local Russian official and military bloggers said on Sunday, the first report of a territorial gain in the Zaporizhzhia region since the

start of a major counter-offensive earlier in June.

Mr Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed regional official, said on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian troops had taken the village of Piatykhatky “under operational control”, and were entrenching themselves there.

Russian forces, he added, were using artillery fire in an attempt to wrest it back.

There was no independent confirmation of those claims.

The Ukrainian military’s nightly General Staff update said Russian forces were “on the defensive” in the region, but made no mention of the village.

On Monday, Ukraine said its forces had recaptured Piatykhatky, a village on the road to one of the most heavily defended areas of the Russian-occupied south, and that they had retaken 113 sq km of land in the last two weeks.

Ukrainian soldiers held up yellow-and-blue national flags in a video circulated on social media, in which they said they were inside Piatykhatky, the eighth south-eastern village that Kyiv says it has liberated.

“Today, June 18, the forces of 128 assault brigade chased out the Russians from the village of Piatykhatky. The Russians ran away leaving equipment and ammunition. Glory to Ukraine,” an unidentified soldier said.

Reuters could not immediately verify where the video was shot.

Still, it would be the first village to be recaptured in recent days, adding to the seven villages that Ukrainian officials said they had retaken farther east in the Donetsk region as part of the counter-offensive that began about a week and a half ago.

“Our troops are advancing, position by position,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address on Sunday. “Step by step, we are moving forward.”

Those gains so far have come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and advanced Western equipment, but military analysts caution that it could take weeks or months to gauge the success of the counter-offensive.

An official statement from the Russian Ministry of Defence summarising the fighting on Sunday said an attack on Piatykhatky had been “repelled”.

But Russian military bloggers, who are often the first to announce battlefield developments in Ukraine, said Moscow’s forces had lost the village after three days of intense fighting.

“Our artillery continues to strike at the enemy infantry, entrenched in this village,” wrote Mr Semyon Pegov, who writes under the name War Gonzo and has more than 1.3 million followers on Telegram.

Mr Pegov was among the pro-Kremlin war correspondents who had a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week.

Mr Mikhail Zvinchuk, who writes under the pseudonym Rybar, said Russian units had retreated from the village, but that the fighting continued on its outskirts.

Another blog called A Veteran’s Notes, which aggregates other reports along with some commentary and analysis, described ferocious fighting in the area.

A large Ukrainian force was making a sustained attempt to break through Russia’s defensive lines, the unnamed blogger wrote, with losses on both sides and the stench of dead bodies drifting over the battlefield.

“Many wounded due to continuous artillery shelling,” the account said.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive has intensified the fighting at several points along the front line in the south, but has shown little sign of a significant breakthrough so far.

A British defence intelligence report on Sunday said that both sides were suffering high casualties, and military experts have said it is likely that months of artillery duels and trench warfare lie ahead.

Independent analysts say that it will be difficult for Ukrainian forces to break through heavily fortified Russian lines that are defended by tank traps, minefields and artillery.

In hopes of making it harder for Russia to fend off the counter-attack, Ukraine has followed a pattern it established in 2022 of launching a series of strikes behind the front lines that target ammunition dumps, military infrastructure and other elements of Moscow’s war machine.

Military officials said on Sunday that Ukraine had struck an ammunition dump near the village of Rykove, in the Kherson region.

The claims could not be immediately verified, but satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times showed heavy damage in an industrial area adjacent to a rail line in Rykove, with smoke still rising from the debris on Sunday morning.

Mr Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa military administration, posted video footage on the Telegram messaging app that was taken from a distance but appeared to show a large fire and smoke billowing above fields.

“Our armed forces dealt a good blow in the morning, and a very loud one, in the village of Rykove,” Mr Bratchuk wrote.

There was no immediate comment from Russian authorities.

The area is significant because it is close to a bridge connecting Crimea – which was occupied by Russia in 2014 – with a belt of land occupied by Russia north of the Sea of Azov.

Military analysts say that one of the probable goals of the counter-offensive is to cut the land bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. NYTIMES, REUTERS