UKRAINE’S military chief warned on the weekend that the battlefield situation in the industrial east has “significantly worsened in recent days,” as warming weather allowed Russian forces to launch a fresh push along several stretches of the more than 620-mile front line.
In an update on the Telegram messaging app, general Oleksandr Syrskyy said that Moscow had “significantly” ramped up its assaults since President Vladimir Putin extended his nearly quarter-century rule in last month’s election.
According to Mr Syrskyy, Russian forces have been “actively attacking” Ukrainian positions in three areas of the eastern Donetsk region, near the cities of Lyman, Bakhmut and Pokrovsk, and beginning to launch tank assaults as drier, warmer spring weather has made it easier for heavy vehicles to move across previously muddy terrain.
“Despite significant losses, the enemy is intensifying its efforts by using new units [equipped with] armoured vehicles, thanks to which it periodically achieves tactical success,” Mr Syrskyy said.
A Russian Defence Ministry spokesman on Saturday confirmed the capture of a village that had been the site of fierce fighting for nearly 18 months.
Analysts from Ukraine’s non-governmental Deep State group, which tracks front-line developments, had reported on Russia’s takeover of Pervomaiske, some 28 miles south-east of Pokrovsk, in the early hours of Thursday.
On Saturday, the group said in a Telegram update that Moscow’s forces had also taken Bohdanivka, another eastern village close to the city of Bakhmut, where the war’s bloodiest battle raged for nine months until it fell to Russia last May.
Ukraine’s Defence Ministry shortly afterwards denied that Bohdanivka had been captured, and said “intense fighting” continued there.
With the war in Ukraine entering its third year and further aid from the United States bogged down in Congress, Russian troops are ramping up pressure on exhausted Ukrainian forces on the front line.
Russia has relied on its edge in firepower and personnel to step up attacks across eastern Ukraine. It has increasingly used satellite-guided gliding bombs — which allow planes to drop them from a safe distance — to pummel Ukrainian forces running low on ammunition and personnel.
In Ukraine’s Russian-occupied south, officials reported a Ukrainian shelling attack that killed 10 people, including children, in a town in the southern Zaporizhzhia region the previous day.
The Tokmak municipal administration reported on Telegram that the shelling struck three apartment blocks on Friday evening.
Five people were pulled alive from the rubble and 13 people were hospitalised, according to the Kremlin-installed regional head Yevhen Balitsky. It was not immediately possible to verify his claims.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately acknowledge or comment on the attack.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, a Russian drone on Saturday dropped explosives on an ambulance that had been called out to a village near the front-line city of Kupiansk, wounding its 58-year-old driver, local governor Oleh Syniehubov reported. His claim could not be independently verified.
