2023-06-09 18:21:18
In the 36 hours since the start of Ukraine’s counterattack, no significant gains have been reported by the country’s political or military leadership, indicating that this phase of the war is likely to be far more difficult than similar campaigns last fall, in which Kyiv exploited Russian weaknesses — including overstretched supply lines — to reclaim territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said early Friday that “very tough battles were underway” in Donetsk, including in the hotly contested city of Bakhmut, which Russia seized last month. Zelensky hinted at some gains but did not offer details. “Bakhmut — well done,” the president said. “Step by step.”
Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces were “actively on the defense” around Orikhiv, a small city 60 miles northeast of Melitopol, which Russia has made the capital of occupied areas of the Zaporizhzhia region. Ukrainian forces had switched to offensive actions after months in defensive positions around Bakhmut and Velyka Novosilka, Maliar said.
Maliar’s comments were the first confirmation by a senior Ukrainian official that the counteroffensive was underway in Zaporizhzhia, where Kyiv hopes its troops can advance south and break the “land bridge” connecting mainland Russia to occupied Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Russian forces claimed to have repelled the Ukrainian advance in Zaporizhzhia. The Russian state news agency Tass published drone footage — which The Washington Post verified — showing destruction of several Ukrainian military vehicles in Zaporizhzhia on Thursday. Those vehicles included German-made Leopard 2 tanks, according to two military analysts.
The long-awaited counteroffensive unfolded as Ukraine’s beleaguered emergency services and Russian occupying authorities struggled to respond to a deepening humanitarian crisis in the southern region of Kherson, where biblical-scale floods followed the collapse of the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday.
Ukrainian officials have insisted that Russia destroyed the dam by setting off an explosion at the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant. Ukrainian security services on Friday released a recording of a phone conversation purportedly between two Russian military personnel that the Ukrainians said provided evidence that Russia had sabotaged the plant.
“It wasn’t them,” a voice, described by the Ukrainians as a Russian soldier, says on the recording, using an expletive to refer to the destruction of the dam. “It was our [guys].”
“[Our] sabotage group was there,” a second soldier says. “They wanted to scare [people] with this dam. It didn’t go according to plan. It was more than they had planned.”
The United States has not publicly issued any determination about what happened at the dam on Tuesday, or who — if anyone — was responsible.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has blamed Ukraine for the dam’s destruction, claiming that Kyiv carried out the attack to “deprive Crimea of water” and distract from the battlefield situation. Russia has not provided evidence to back up that claim, or explained how Ukraine attacked the dam, which Russia seized at the start of its invasion last year.
At least one person died in the floods, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said, and thousands of people were evacuated, with many more awaiting rescue.
The death toll was potentially far higher in Russian-occupied areas on the east bank of the Dnieper River, where some towns and villages were completely submerged and residents complained that help was slow to arrive.
Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed leader of occupied Kherson, said that at least eight people had died in flooded territories under Russia’s control and that 5,800 people had been evacuated, “of which 243 are children, 62 people with limited mobility.”
Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for continued shelling in Kherson that is adding to the misery of residents trying to escape the devastating floods.
On Thursday, four people died and at least 17 were injured in four separate artillery attacks by Russian forces on Kherson city and its surrounding villages, according to Kherson regional head Oleksandr Prokunin and Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. Journalists in Ukrainian-controlled Kherson recorded two of the attacks.
It is unclear if the flooding on the occupied east bank of the Dnieper will hamper or aid Ukraine’s military operations in Zaporizhzhia. Zelensky said Wednesday that the military was unaffected by the dam disaster. Some Russian military positions were wiped out by the floods, but Ukraine’s ability to move forces through the area is also now heavily restricted.
Russian forces also carried out two separate rocket attacks in the central Ukrainian regions of Cherkasy and Zhytomyr on Thursday night and in the early hours of Friday, killing one person and injuring a total of 11, according to regional leaders.
On Friday, a drone hit a residential building in the city of Voronezh in western Russia. Tass reported that the drone had targeted a local aircraft plant but instead fell on a residential area after it was intercepted, injuring three people.
Voronezh Gov. Alexander Gusev declared a state of emergency after the attack. “The Kyiv regime continues to attack civilian infrastructure facilities, residential buildings,” Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said during his briefing call. “But we continue the fight and continue the military defense.”
Water will continue to flow over the destroyed dam from the Kakhovka reservoir at its current rate for the next seven to eight days, Ihor Syrota, the director of Ukraine’s state hydroelectric company, said on national television. The state company did not comment on how the continued flow of water will affect settlements downstream.
The dam collapse could also have implications for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, now held by Russia, which used water from the reservoir for cooling. The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, on Thursday described the situation as “precarious.” According to Grossi, the plant is still pumping cooling water from the reservoir, but it was unclear when and at what level the reservoir will stabilize.
Francesca Ebel in London contributed to this report.
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