Ukrainian forces are holding their positions against Russian troops in the eastern Donbas region and making small advances in some areas, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday.
“On the whole, we are holding our positions,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “There are also some areas of the front where we are advancing a bit.”
Zelenskiy also said Ukraine, subject to waves of Russian air attacks, had strengthened its anti-aircraft capability and would further strengthen it in the new year to protect both itself and the entire European continent.
But Ukrainian officials and a Russian-installed leader said Kyiv’s forces continued their advance in the south on October 3, recapturing several villages along the strategic Dnieper River, which bisects the country.
The Ukrainian military’s southern operational command said in a nightly update that its forces in the south destroyed 31 Russian tanks and one multiple-rocket launcher, without providing details of where the fighting occurred.
“New population centers have been liberated in several regions. Fierce fighting continues in many areas of the front,” Zelenskiy said without specifying which settlements had been liberated.
He added that “more and more occupiers are trying to escape, more and more losses are being borne by the enemy army, and there is a growing understanding that Russia made a mistake by going to war against Ukraine.”
A day earlier Zelenskiy said its forces took full control of the strategic eastern city of Lyman in the Donetsk region.
The recapture of Lyman was the Ukrainian forces’ most significant battlefield gain in weeks and followed a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region to the north that drove out Russian troops and stunned many observers.
The fall of Lyman was also the latest setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, coming one day after he proclaimed the illegal annexation of Donetsk and three other Ukrainian regions that have been partly occupied by Russian forces for months now.
Kyiv and the West have condemned the annexation declaration as illegal and a sham.
Serhiy Cherevatiy, a spokesman for the Eastern Group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Ukrainian troops went on to liberate the settlement of Torske near Lyman on October 3.
In the south, Vladimir Saldo, the Russia-installed leader in occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kherson province, told Russian state television that Ukrainian troops recaptured the town of Dudchany along the west bank of the Dnieper River.
“There are settlements that are occupied by Ukrainian forces,” Saldo said.
Dudchany is located some 30 kilometers south of where the front stood before the Ukrainian breakthrough on October 3, indicating the fastest advance of the war in the south.
© 2022, GDC. © GDC and www.globaldefensecorp.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to www.globaldefensecorp.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Be the first to comment