- No official Ukrainian confirmation of southern advance
- Russian military bloggers say the troops are retreating dozens of kilometers
- Ukraine gets a boost from the weekend’s capture of Lyman in the east
Kyiv, Oct 3 (Portal) – Ukrainian forces are said to have retaken towns along the west bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine on Monday, with Moscow forcing territory along a second major frontline just days after claiming to have annexed it to deliver .
The extent of the Ukrainian advance was unconfirmed, and Kyiv remained silent about the situation in the region. But Russian military bloggers described a Ukrainian tank advance through tens of kilometers of territory along the river bank.
In one of a Ukrainian official’s rare comments on the situation, Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko released video of a Ukrainian soldier waving a flag in Zolota Balka, downriver from the former front line.
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Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think tank, quoted Russian bloggers as reporting that their forces are falling back as far as Dudchany – 40 km (25 miles) downstream from where they faced Ukrainian troops a day earlier had.
“When so many Russian channels sound the alarm, it usually means they’re in trouble,” he wrote on Twitter.
A Ukrainian advance along the Dnipro River could trap thousands of Russian troops on the other side, cut off from all supplies. The river is enormously wide, and Ukraine has already destroyed the major crossings.
The reports were the first to describe a rapid Ukrainian advance in the south of the country since the beginning of the war, and come just a day after Ukraine routed Russian forces at a large bastion, Lyman, at the opposite end of the front line to the east would have.
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A Ukrainian service member dismounts a cannon from a captured Russian armored personnel carrier amid the Russian attack on Ukraine near the town of Izium in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, October 2, 2022. Portal/Vladyslav Musiienko
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The pushes east and south — some of the biggest of the war yet — have all taken place in areas President Vladimir Putin claimed he had annexed from Ukraine as recently as Friday with a celebratory concert at the Kremlin walls.
They also come amid reports of chaos in a mobilization ordered by Putin less than two weeks ago, in which tens of thousands of Russian men were suddenly drafted into the military and tens of thousands others fled abroad.
Mikhail Degtyarev, governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia’s far east, said about half of the men drafted there were found unfit for duty and sent home. He dismissed the region’s military commissar.
The fall of Lyman in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province, hours after Putin declared its annexation, paves the way for Ukrainian forces to push deeper into Russian territory and cut off remaining Russian supply routes.
“Thanks to the successful operation at Lyman, we are moving towards the second north-south route… and that means a second line of supply is disrupted,” said Reserve Colonel Viktor Kevlyuk of Ukraine’s Defense Strategies Center think-tank.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the capture of Lyman demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to drive out Russian forces and demonstrated the impact Ukraine’s use of advanced Western weapons was having on the conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the success of the country’s soldiers was not limited to Lyman.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Washington was “very encouraged” by Ukraine’s achievements.
Russia’s parliament is scheduled to consider bills to include Ukraine’s four regions on Monday, the speaker of the lower house of parliament said. These are Donetsk and Luhansk to the east, and Kherson and Zaporizhia to the south.
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Writing by Peter Graff Edited by Gareth Jones
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