Kyiv: Russia has launched a counter-offensive in its Kursk region to dislodge Ukraine's forces who stormed across the border five weeks ago and put Russian territory under foreign occupation for the first time since World War II, Ukraine's president said Thursday.
Russia's Defense Ministry said that Moscow's forces had recaptured 10 settlements in Kursk and listed their names but didn't describe the fighting as a counter-offensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia was taking “counter-offensive actions” but that Ukrainian forces had anticipated the moves and were ready to fight.
Daring incursion
Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Kursk on August 6, partly in the hope that Russia would divert its troops there from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine where a push by the Russian army is threatening to overrun a belt of key defensive strongholds. The cross-border operation also raised Ukrainian morale after months of gloomy news from the front by exposing Russian vulnerabilities and seizing some initiative on the battlefield. It also sought to establish a buffer zone to prevent Russian attacks.
Moscow's muddled response suggested Russia hadn't planned for such a development and was caught by surprise. Assembling forces for a counterattack, given the long distances involved and other demands along the 1,000-kilometer front line, was expected to take some time.
Russia's relentless missile and drone attacks
The Russian army has been hacking its way deeper into eastern Ukraine, especially Donetsk, and has battered Ukrainian territory with relentless missile and drone attacks. A Russian missile attack Thursday killed three people and injured two others, all of them Ukrainian workers with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Ukraine's Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets said.
The toll was the largest among staffers at the Geneva-based humanitarian organization since a bomb blast killed three at the Aden airport in Yemen in 2020.
The key eastern Ukraine city of Pokrovsk is without a drinking water supply or natural gas for cooking and heating, authorities said, as the Russian army's attritional slog across the Donetsk region lays waste to public infrastructure and forces civilians to flee their homes. A water filtration station in Pokrovsk was damaged in recent fighting, and more than 300 hastily drilled water wells are the city's last source of drinking water, Donetsk regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin said.
Russia targets Ukraine energy stations
The previous day, Russians destroyed a natural gas distribution station near Pokrovsk, Filashkin said. Some 18,000 people remain in the city, including 522 children, he said. More than 20,000 people have left in the past six weeks as Russian forces creep closer to residential areas, Filashkin said. “Evacuation is the only … choice for civilians,” he added.
Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine's main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine's defensive abilities and supply routes and would bring Russia closer to its stated goal of capturing the entire Donetsk region, which it partially occupies.
Russian troops backed by artillery and powerful glide bombs have turned Donetsk cities and towns such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka into bombed-out shells, though the push has cost Russia heavily in troops and armor. Ukrainian forces have held out as long as possible, even when strongholds such as Chasiv Yar appeared to be in danger of imminent collapse. Russia has fired missiles especially at the power grid, potentially dooming Ukrainians to a bitterly cold winter this year.
(With inputs from agency)
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