Ukraine has stepped up attacks this weekend on Russian arms depots and other targets deep in occupied territory, supporting a counteroffensive that has made modest gains against heavily fortified Russian frontline positions.
A series of big explosions rocked a village overnight in Russian-occupied parts of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, which local officials said was a successful strike on an ammunition depot.
“Nice job guys. More fire,” wrote Mykola Oleshchuk, commander of Ukraine’s air force, in a Telegram channel on Sunday, posting a video of the hours-long explosions.
Ukrainian officials said the strike took place in the village of Rykove, 170km south of the closest frontline, where Kyiv’s forces have this month gained limited ground in the early stages of a broader counteroffensive.
Amid fierce fighting, Ukraine last week said its forces had so far liberated about 100 sq km of territory in the region, including a handful of villages.
Vladimir Rogov, the Russian-installed leader of occupied parts of Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, acknowledged on Sunday that Ukrainian forces had captured the village of Pyatykhatky, just south of Lobkove, which was liberated earlier.
“Enemy wave attacks are yielding results despite colossal losses,” Rogov said on the Telegram channel. Without mentioning Pyatykhatky, Russia’s defence ministry claimed on Sunday to have thwarted Ukrainian assaults in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions.
Ukrainian troops have in this early phase of the counteroffensive focused on softening ground ahead for infantry with long-range missile and artillery strikes. Ukrainian forces have also been testing Russian positions for weaknesses along a more than 1,000km frontline in southeastern regions.
Ukrainian brigadier general Oleksandr Tarnavsky, commander of southern forces, claimed that 12 Russian ammunition storage sites had been destroyed in the prior 24 hours. “Every day turns into hell for Russians,” he said.
The UK ministry of defence said on Sunday that while both sides were suffering high casualties, Russian losses were likely to be “the highest since the peak of the battle for Bakhmut in March”.
The long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive started this month with a new push by its forces to gradually regain territory in the south, where slow gains have been reported recently.
Volodymyr Gavrylov, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, noted the importance of high-precision strikes at long distances to shape the battlefield. Ukraine did not disclose whether UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which have a range of up to 550km, were used in the strikes this weekend.
The intensifying battlefield developments came hours after a delegation of African leaders led by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa repeated his calls for “de-escalation” during a Saturday meeting in St Petersburg with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“We are convinced that now is the time for both sides to begin talks and end this war,” Ramaphosa told Putin, stressing that the interruption of supplies of Black Sea region grain was hurting his continent.
Meeting with the African peace mission in Kyiv on Friday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would be ready for peace talks after Russian forces withdrew from Ukraine. Zelenskyy said he would not agree to “freezing the war” to give Russian troops time to regroup and reboot their faltering invasion.