Both sides suffer heavy casualties as Ukraine hits back at Russia: UK assessment
Russia and Ukraine are suffering huge numbers of military casualties as Ukraine struggles to drive Kremlin forces out of the occupied territories in the early stages of its counteroffensive, British officials said on Sunday.
Russian casualties are likely to be the highest since the Battle of Bakhmut peaked in March, British military officials said in their regular assessment.
According to British intelligence, the fiercest fighting was concentrated in the Zaporizhia province in the southeast, around Bakhmut and further west in the Donetsk province in eastern Ukraine. While the update said Ukraine was on the offensive in these areas and had “made small advances,” Russian forces were conducting “relatively effective defensive operations” in southern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said in a regular update Sunday morning that Russia had carried out 43 airstrikes, four rocket attacks and 51 multiple rocket launcher attacks in the past 24 hours. According to the General Staff statement, Russia continues to focus its efforts on offensive operations in Ukraine’s industrial east, concentrating its attacks on Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Marinka and Lyman in Donetsk province. There have been 26 battles so far.
Ukrainian officials said Russian forces have also launched airstrikes in other parts of the east and south of the country.
One civilian was killed and four others injured in Kherson province as a result of Russian attacks, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said, while Zaporizhia regional governor Yuriy Malashko said one person was injured in Russian attacks that hit 20 settlements in the province been.
So said Vladimir Rogov, an official in the Moscowappointed administration in the partially occupied Zaporizhia region On Sunday, Ukrainian forces took control of the village of Piatykhatky on the Zaporizhia front.
Serhiy Brachuk, spokesman for the regional government in the southwestern province of Odessa, said Ukrainian forces destroyed a “very important” ammunition depot near the Russianheld port city of Henichesk in neighboring Kherson province.
“Our armed forces dealt a heavy blow in the morning,” Bratschuk said in a video message posted on his Telegram channel on Sunday morning.
Western analysts and military officials have warned that Ukraine’s counteroffensive to drive Kremlin forces out of the occupied territories, using advanced westernsupplied weapons in attacks along the 1,000kilometer frontline, could be a long one.
African visit
A group of African leaders have been conducting a selfproclaimed “peacekeeping mission” in Ukraine and Russia in recent days to help end the nearly 16month war. However, the visit ended on Saturday with no immediate signs of progress.
In other developments:
Volodymyr Artyukh, governor of Sumy region in northern Ukraine, which borders Russia, said a father and son were killed by Russian shelling in the village of Bilopilya. Across the border, three villages in Russia’s Kursk region were hit by Ukrainian shelling, Governor Roman Starovoit said.
- The death toll from flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam has risen to 16 in Ukrainiancontrolled areas, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said late Saturday, while Russian officials said 29 people died in Moscowcontrolled areas.
The destruction of the dam on June 6 caused massive flooding that devastated towns on the lower Dnieper River in Kherson province, a front line in the war. Russia and Ukraine blame each other for causing the breach.
- As the deadline approaches for all Russian volunteer formations to sign contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry, which are widely believed to be aimed at the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Wagner leader and regular Kremlin critic Yevgeny Prigozhin said Sunday that 32,000 former prisoners returned home after their contracts had ended with Wagner in Ukraine.
According to Prigozhin, 83 crimes were committed by returnees, which he says is “80 times fewer” than the number of those who left prison in the same period without having served with Wagner.
Prigozhin visited Russian prisons to recruit fighters and promised pardons if they survived half a year at Wagner’s front. In an interview last month, Prigozhin said he had recruited 50,000 convicts, about 10,000 of whom were killed in Bakhmut.
SOURCE: AP News