[1/5]A Ukrainian military member inspects a former Russian position outside the village of Robotyne, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, near a front line in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, November 4, 2023. Portal/Stringer LICENSE
November 6 (Portal) – Russia and Ukraine gave conflicting reports over the weekend about what was happening on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region. Moscow said it had stopped Kiev’s counteroffensive and the Ukrainian army said it was continuing to press.
Ukraine has recaptured some small villages in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region since its counteroffensive began in June, but progress has been slow and the sprawling frontline in the east and south of the country has changed little in the past year.
“The enemy has been stopped and its vaunted counteroffensive has been completely halted,” Yevgeny Balitsky, the top Moscow-appointed official in the Zaporizhzhia region, told the Russian state news agency in a statement published on Monday.
Balitsky said small skirmishes broke out near the village of Robotyne and the village of Shcherbaky, about 14 miles (22 km) to the northwest.
Because both sides control the spread of information about the battlefield and score successes in small pockets of territory, it was difficult to determine who made significant advances and how fierce the fighting was.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday evening that Russian forces had carried out several unsuccessful attacks near Robotyne and Verbove, a village a few kilometers east of it.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in its daily briefing on Sunday that Russian forces repelled Ukraine’s attacks near Verbove and Robotyne.
However, analysts at the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said Ukraine had made “limited progress west of Verbowe.”
Ukrainian news agency General Stuff also said that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the direction of Melitopol in the western Zaporizhzhia region, “exhausting the enemy along the entire front line.”
Russia said over the weekend that its air defense forces had repelled Ukrainian airstrikes there.
President Volodymyr Zelensky denied at the weekend that the war with Russia was at a “stalemate” after his commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, said the conflict was shifting toward static and attrition fighting.
Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Raju Gopalakrishnan
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