Ukraine has been laying the groundwork for weeks, amassing forces and weapons, and now it says it is making progress in the south of the country.
Supported by long-range weapons newly acquired by the West, the country’s forces, which have long promised to launch a counteroffensive, have destroyed key Russian targets in the Ukrainian city of Kherson.
Russian troops are “virtually cut off” by the counter-offensive, which is “getting momentum”, the British Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence briefing Thursday.
At least three bridges over the Dnipro River were damaged, he said, adding that the strategic Antonivsky Bridge used to transport supplies to the southern city was likely “unusable”. As a result, the Russian 49th Army stationed west of the river was “very vulnerable”, he said.
Retaking Kherson, which was seized by President Vladimir Putin’s forces at the start of the invasion, would be “a major blow to the Russian war effort,” modern European history professor Udi Greenberg told NBC News on Thursday. at Dartmouth College. messaging app.
As a port city, he said, “it has major strategic and economic values”.
Greenberg added that the counter-offensive had “the potential to be very significant”, as Ukraine had “so far been mainly on the defensive” and would “test the country’s ability to shift the balance of this military conflict”.
It would be the first time a major city has been recaptured by Ukrainian forces since the conflict began on February 24.
Building on the success of recent attacks, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has called on Russian troops in Kherson to retreat, warning that they would be “wiped out” if they remained in the city. “The choice is theirs,” the ministry tweeted on Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, promised to rebuild the destroyed bridges in a video address broadcast late at night on his Telegram channel on Wednesday. But he insisted that his forces were “doing everything to ensure that the occupiers had no logistical opportunities on our lands”.
The Kremlin has not commented on the attacks, but Kirill Stremousov, who is the deputy head of Kherson’s Russian-backed military-civilian administration, denied that the bridge strikes affected the city’s supply . They “would in no way affect the outcome of hostilities”, he told Russian news agency RIA.
The move south to Kherson comes after fighting intensified in the eastern province of Donetsk in recent days, as Russian forces appeared to emerge from an “operational pause” after capturing the nearby city of Luhansk.
Valeriy Akimenko, a research associate at the UK-based Conflict Studies Research Center, said he did not believe Ukraine could reclaim the two industrial regions that make up Donbass.
But, he said, the fighting there could “open up other possibilities of punching holes in what must be a very thin Russian line in southern Ukraine.”
However, Ukrainian defense officials have warned that Russia is mustering forces to deal with the counteroffensive.
“The enemy is now concentrating the maximum number (of forces) precisely in the direction of Kherson,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in a televised address on Wednesday, while that he warned of “a very large-scale movement” of Russian troops.
He added that he was “cautious” in assessing the timing of a possible counter-offensive. “I really wish it was much faster,” he said, adding that “the enemy is now concentrating the maximum number (of forces) precisely in the direction of Kherson.”
Elsewhere, Russian forces on Thursday launched a missile attack on the Kyiv region for the first time in weeks and also pounded the northern Chernihiv region, Ukrainian officials said.
Associated press contributed.
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