Russian-backed forces have made some advances in eastern Ukraine, Britain said on Friday, even as Moscow’s hold weakens in the south, where a Russian-installed official has offered to help residents flee a region Russia claims to have annexed.
A British intelligence update said forces led by the private Russian military company Wagner Group had captured the villages of Optyine and Ivangrad south of the fiercely-contested town of Bakhmut, the first such advance in more than three months.
“There have been few, if any, other settlements seized by regular Russian or separatist forces since early July,” said the daily update from London, which normally focuses on Ukrainian battlefield successes.
Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in late August against Russian forces occupying the country since the start of their invasion in February, pushing them out of a large part of the northeast and putting them under heavy pressure in the south.
Following the Russian setbacks, Moscow’s close ally Belarus ordered troops to deploy with Russian forces near Ukraine this week, prompting concern it may send its forces across the border for the first time.
On Friday President Alexander Lukashenko placed Belarus in what he called a state of heightened terrorism alert due to tension on its borders. Ukraine has denied attacking Belarus.
Kyiv’s main focus now is Kherson – one of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed in recent weeks, and arguably the most strategically important.
Russia’s TASS news agency said evacuees from the Kherson region were expected to begin arriving in Russia on Friday, a day after a Russian-installed official suggested people could flee to Russia, especially those around Kherson city.
While some people in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine have fled to Russia as Ukrainian forces advance, others have reported being forced towards Russia and others still have fled westward to Ukrainian-controlled parts of their country.
STRATEGIC TARGET
A flight of civilians from Kherson would be a blow to Russia’s claim last month to have annexed around 15% of Ukraine’s territory and incorporated an area the size of Portugal into Russia. Three quarters of U.N. members condemned the move as illegal on Wednesday.
Kherson city, the only major conurbation Russia has captured intact since invading in February, controls the only land route to the Crimea peninsula seized by Russia in 2014 and the mouth of the Dnipro river that bisects Ukraine.
Since the start of October, Ukrainian forces have burst through Russia’s front lines in the region in their biggest advance in the south since the war began, aiming to cut Russian troops off from supply lines and escape routes across the river.
Ukraine said earlier on Friday that its armed forces had retaken 600 settlements in the past month, including 75 in the Kherson region and 43 in the eastern Donetsk region, where Optyine and Ivangrad lie.
“The area of liberated Ukrainian territories has increased significantly,” the Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporary Occupied Territories said on its website.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the battlefield reports.
Kherson lies next to the Zaporizhzhia region, also claimed by Russia, where Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant is based.
A Russian-installed official said the plant was now working according to Russian standards. It was not clear if Ukrainian workers, who had continued operating the plant under the eye of Russian troops, were still there.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency tweeted separately that Russia and Ukraine were moving closer to agreeing a protection zone for the plant, where he said the situation was “untenable”.
Moscow calls the conflict, which has killed thousands of Ukrainians and left cities, towns and villages in ruins, a “special military operation” to demilitarise a country whose moves towards the West threaten Russia’s own security. Kyiv and its Western allies say it is an unprovoked war of conquest.
The British report said the Russians had severe shortages of munitions and manpower and were being undermined by Ukrainian forces on the northern and southern ends of the front line.
Russia’s Wagner group was targeting Bakhmut, it said, to try to seize the Kramatorsk-Solviansk urban area of the eastern Donetsk region, which was among those Russia said it had annexed despite not being in full control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy reported ongoing “brutal” fighting there in a video address late on Thursday.
Wagner was founded by Yevgeniy Prighozin, a Russian catering tycoon nicknamed “Putin’s chef”, in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and started providing support to pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
In July, Ukraine’s SBU domestic security agency blamed the group for the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war in an explosion at a prison in Russian-controlled Ukrainian settlement of Olenivka. Russia blamed Ukraine.
In his address, Zelenskiy said no one had yet visited Olenivka, accusing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of inaction in upholding the rights of Ukrainian POWs.
The ICRC said it had been ready to visit for months, adding. “We cannot access by force a place of detention or internment where we have not been admitted.”
Alongside the annexation, Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded to the battlefield setbacks with other moves to escalate the conflict: calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists and threatening to use nuclear weapons.
This week, Russia launched the biggest air strikes since the start of the war, firing more than 100 cruise missiles mainly at Ukraine’s electricity and heat infrastructure.
It also repeated that it is prepared to negotiate a peace deal, which some analysts have interpreted as recognition by the Kremlin that its forces are under pressure. Ukraine has ruled out talks, saying Russian forces must just leave.
By Reuters
