Ukraine’s forces push forward on two fronts
By Andrew E. Kramer and Maria Varenikova
IZIUM — The Ukrainian army was on the move on Monday (3) in two theatres, as Kyiv’s forces chased retreating Russian troops outside the reclaimed city of Lyman in the east and Moscow-installed officials acknowledged losing ground in the southern region of Kherson.
Buoyed by their recapture over the weekend of Lyman, a strategic rail hub and gateway to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukrainian officials said that forces pushing east from the city had destroyed a Russian armoured column near the village of Torske. The attack left roads in the dense pine forest cluttered with burned tanks and armoured vehicles, said Vladyslav Podkich, a Ukrainian military spokesman.
The attack could not be independently verified. But Russian officials admitted setbacks in the east, saying that Ukrainian forces had crossed the administrative border of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, a territory claimed by Moscow-backed rebels, and had set up positions closer to the city of Lysychansk, which Russia claimed over the summer following weeks of bloody fighting.
“Despite casualties, Ukrainian forces managed to cross the LPR administrative border and to secure their positions in the direction of Lysychansk,” a spokesman for the separatist group, Andrei Marochko, told Russia’s Interfax news agency. He said Russian air and ground forces were firing at the advancing Ukrainians.
Hundreds of miles away in the south, where a Ukrainian counteroffensive against dug-in Russians has been slower to advance, there were new signs of progress for Kyiv’s forces. Russia’s Defence Ministry acknowledged on Monday that Ukrainian tank units had managed to penetrate its line of defence in part of the Kherson region.
A Russian-installed official in the region, Kirill Stremousov, said that Ukrainian troops had advanced along the Dnieper River in the direction of the Russian-held regional capital of Kherson, but insisted that “the situation is completely under control.”
The announcements suggested that Ukrainian forces were attacking Russian forces as they pulled back in both eastern and southern Ukraine. “The successes of our military are not limited only to Lyman,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Sunday (2).
Ukraine’s ability to advance in the south appeared to be part of a strategy that came into focus in recent weeks, as its forces began to take advantage of their shorter internal resupply lines to quickly shift troops between locations. That has allowed Ukraine to attack Russian forces in two areas at once along the long front line, military experts say.
Analysts have said a risk for the Ukrainian military is that it advances too quickly, stretching its forces too thin and becoming vulnerable to counterattack. Fighting in the east has been so fast-paced, soldiers from several Ukrainian brigades said in interviews, that they do not know where they will be deployed day to day. Some units that had been assigned to mop-up operations in the reclaimed city of Izium last month, for example, were redeployed to villages farther east over the weekend.
-New York Times
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