‘Heavy fighting’ between Ukrainian forces and the Russian military is taking place in ‘almost all’ of the southern occupied Kherson region, where Kyiv troops have launched a counter-offensive, the presidency said on Tuesday. Ukrainian. “Powerful explosions took place all day (Monday) and all night in the Kherson region. Heavy fighting is taking place on almost the entire territory of the region,” the presidency said in its morning briefing, adding that Ukrainian troops “have launched offensive actions in various directions.”
“Ukraine is taking back what is hers and will take back everything in the end – the regions of Kharkiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Crimea, the waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov ( …)”, hammered in his daily message Monday evening the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The Russian bombardments have also not ceased on the front line which extends from north to south. The local authorities notably mentioned strikes in the regions of Kharkiv (north-east), Dnipropetrovsk (center), where they killed one person, and Mykolaiv.
The Ukrainian counter-attack is essentially aimed at retaking Kherson, a city of 280,000 inhabitants before the conflict, which fell into Russian hands at the start of the war on February 24, local officials announced. “Ukrainian armed forces launched their offensive in several areas in the south. We ask the residents of Kherson to follow the safety instructions, ”wrote on Telegram the head of the regional administration Yaroslav Yanuchevych.
“Today there were powerful artillery attacks on enemy positions (…) throughout the territory of the occupied Kherson region. This is the announcement of what we have been waiting for since the spring: it is the beginning of the end of the occupation of the Kherson region”, located at the gates of Crimea annexed by Moscow in March 2014, announced to Ukrainian television MP Sergei Khlan.
The Ukrainians would have the advantage
He assured that the Ukrainian military had the “advantage” on the southern front after repeated strikes in recent weeks on bridges and a dam on the Dnieper River, intended to disrupt the logistics of Russian troops. The Ukrainian military group “Kakhovka” said it observed the retreat of a unit of pro-Russian separatist fighters from its positions in the region.
Russia for its part claimed to have repelled Ukrainian “offensive attempts” in the regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv, also in southern Ukraine. “During the day (…), Ukrainian troops made an attempted offensive in three directions, in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions,” the Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that it “failed miserably”. and that the Ukrainians had “suffered heavy losses”.
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The spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army’s “Southern” command, Natalia Goumenyuk, had previously said that kyiv forces were attacking “from many directions” on this front in order to push the Russians back to the left bank of the Dnieper. During the night of Monday to Tuesday, this command clarified on Facebook that the situation remained “tense” in its area of action, stressing that “the enemy attacked our positions five times, but all of them were a failure”.
He also mentioned a “massive bombardment during the day” of Mikolaiv by the Russians with sixteen S-300 anti-aircraft missiles which caused “significant” damage, particularly to residential buildings and transport infrastructure. Two civilians were killed and 24 injured, according to this source.
Two missiles fell in the evening in the Bachtansky region, damaging houses but no casualties were reported at this stage, she added. All of this information was unverifiable from independent sources.