2023-12-02 00:56:52
The Russian army goes on the attack again. Moscow said on Friday it was advancing “in all directions” in Ukraine, where it is on the offensive in the east of the country.
Russian forces are “extending their zones of control in all directions,” said Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, assuring that the Ukrainians’ combat capabilities had been “considerably reduced” after their counter-offensive.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive, launched this summer after months of preparations, stalled in the South and East in the face of the scale of the defenses – notably formidable minefields – deployed by the Russians, without any advances. scale nor hope of a breakthrough at the start of winter.
Since the beginning of autumn, Russian forces have been relentlessly attacking Avdiivka, an industrial town on the outskirts of Donetsk (east) which they are seeking to encircle and take.
Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the Ukrainian commander responsible for the Avdiïvka area, however assured Friday that his men “firmly hold the lines”, still inflicting significant losses on the Russians, who according to him are launching attacks using armored vehicles. but also by successive human waves.
In their daily report, the Ukrainian armed forces essentially denied the Russian minister’s statements, claiming to have repelled countless Russian attacks across the entire front line.
67 confrontations in recent days
According to this report published Friday evening, 67 armed confrontations took place. The Ukrainian army claims to have repelled 9 Russian attacks in the Kupiansk area (north-east), 7 in the Lyman area (east), 18 in the Bakhmout area, 16 in the Avdiivka area. “In the Zaporizhia region (south), the enemy tried in vain, 10 times, to regain lost ground” during the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the report adds.
As for the southern region of Kherson, where Ukrainian forces managed to establish bridgeheads on the left bank of the Dnieper River where they had managed to push back the Russians last year, “the armed forces will continue to hold on there their positions,” assured the Ukrainian army. Le Parisien was not able to verify all of these assertions independently.
At the same time, Russian forces continue to bomb cities in Ukraine every night. During the night from Thursday to Friday, “the enemy used two Kh-59 missiles and 25 Shahed 136/131 attack drones,” the Ukrainian Air Force said, claiming to have shot down 18 drones and one missile. over the southern regions. She did not say whether Russia had managed to hit its targets.
Sabotage in the Russian Far East
Ukraine, for its part, regularly launches drones towards Russian territory, some even reaching Moscow. They are usually shot down by Russian anti-aircraft defenses, doing limited damage.
But this time, it was thousands of kilometers to the east that the Ukrainian security services (SBU) carried out a double sabotage operation on the masterful Baikal-Amur, a railway line of strategic importance serving the Extreme -Russian East, a source within the Ukrainian security forces said on Friday.
The first attack took place during the night from Wednesday to Thursday in the Bessolov tunnel in Severomouisk, the longest in Russia, said this source, according to which four explosive devices were triggered during the passage of a convoy of petroleum products.
The second then targeted an alternative section of the railway line to which traffic had been diverted, at the time when a convoy “passed over a 35 meter high bridge”, said this source. The SBU declined to comment officially on these claims.
Russian Railways limited itself to reporting on Thursday on Telegram a fire on a train transporting fuel in the Severomuysk tunnel. Rail traffic was diverted to another section, they added, without citing the second incident.
However, the Telegram Baza channel, close to Russian security services and followed by more than a million people, reported on Friday “sabotage” having caused explosions on two trains “in the same area” of Buryatia.
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