Zelenskiy says Ukraine inflicts frontline losses on Russian troops in Donetsk region
(Reuters) -Ukrainian forces suffered heavy casualties in a counteroffensive in the eastern Donetsk region, the main theater of Ukraine’s more than 3-1/2-year war, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday.
Zelenskiy’s statement, based on a report by Ukraine’s top commander, contradicted Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin’s speech to senior Russian officers a day earlier, in which he said Moscow forces retained the strategic initiative in all front-line sectors.
Speaking in the night video speech, Zelenskiy said he spoke with senior commander Oleksandr Syrskyi for almost an hour “paying particular attention to our counter-offensive, the Dobropillia operation.” He explained that there were heavy losses in the region.
Ukraine noted the successes at Dobropillia, just north of the logistics center of Pokrovsk, one of the main targets of Russia’s slow westward advance through the Donetsk region.
Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces were “protecting ourselves in all other directions,” referring specifically to Kupiansk, a largely destroyed town in northeastern Ukraine that had come under heavy Russian attacks for months.
He also described conditions around Novopavlivka, further south in the Zaporizhzhia region, as “difficult”, but said “our active defensive actions there are yielding good results”.
Reuters could not independently verify either side’s battlefield accounts.
Putin was in Russia’s northwest on Tuesday in St. Petersburg, the country’s second largest city. Russia has retaken nearly 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles) of land in Ukraine by 2025, he told senior officials near St. Petersburg.
He said that Ukrainian forces were withdrawing on all sectors of the front and that if Kiev tried to attack deep into Russian territory, it would not work.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday it had taken control of the village of Novohryhorivka in the southern Zaporizhia region, the latest in a series of almost daily announcements of newly captured settlements.
The regional governor of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine said that three people were killed in and around the city of the same name in Russian attacks on Wednesday.
The governor of the Sumy region on Russia’s northern border said that 3 people died in the attacks carried out by Russian unmanned aerial vehicles in different districts.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
