DM Monitoring
KYIV: President Volodymyr Zelenskiy marked progress in a counter-offensive Ukraine that began last week, thanking his forces for taking two settlements in the south, a third in the east, as well as additional territory in the east of the country.
He did not say precisely where the territories were and provided no timeline except to say that he had received “good reports” at a meeting on Sunday from his military commanders and head of intelligence.
In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy thanked his forces for liberating a settlement in the eastern Donetsk region, the taking of “certain heights” also in an eastern area in the Lysychansk-Siversk direction and for liberating two southern settlements.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the president’s office, earlier on Sunday posted an image of soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over a village he labeled as being in the southern area that is the main focus of the counter-offensive.
“Vysokopillya. Kherson region. Ukraine. Today,” Tymoshenko wrote in a Facebook post over a photo of three soldiers on rooftops, one of them fixing a Ukrainian flag to a post.
Located just north of the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow invaded and annexed in February and March 2014, the Kherson region was seized by Russian forces early in the current conflict.
Lysychansk was claimed by pro-Russian separatists in the Luhansk region in early July as part of a battle over the coalmining Donbas area in eastern Ukraine, which also includes Siversk.
Monday, Ukraine made its boldest claim yet of success on the battlefield in its week-old counter-offensive against Russian forces in the south, while European markets went into free-fall after Russia kept its main gas pipeline to Germany shut.
Following days of silence about their new offensive, Ukrainian officials posted an image online of three soldiers raising a flag over a town in Kherson province, a southern region occupied by Russia since the war’s early days.
The image of the flag being fixed to a pole on a rooftop, purportedly in Vysokopyllya in the north of Kherson, was released as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had captured two towns in the south and one in the east. In an overnight address, he did not identify the locations.
After months of enduring punishing Russian artillery assaults in the east, Ukraine has at last begun its long-awaited counter-attack, its biggest since it repelled Russian forces from the outskirts of Kyiv in March.
Ukraine had kept most details of its new campaign under wraps, banning journalists from the frontline and offering little public commentary in order to preserve tactical surprise.
Russia has said it has pushed back assaults in Kherson, but in a rare acknowledgment of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, TASS news agency quoted a Moscow-installed official in the region as saying plans for a referendum on joining Russia had been put on hold due to the security situation.
Mark Hertling, a retired former commander of US ground forces in Europe, said Kyiv’s aim seemed to be to trap thousands of Russian troops on the east bank of the vast Dnipro River, destroying bridges that are both supply and escape routes.
