Battles Rage as Ukraine Tries to Retake Russian-Occupied Territory
Military analysts and U.S. officials said it was too soon to judge the success of Ukraine’s offensive, which is looking for weaknesses to exploit, in the face of fierce resistance.
Military analysts and U.S. officials said it was too soon to judge the success of Ukraine’s offensive, which is looking for weaknesses to exploit, in the face of fierce resistance.
The assaults, with Western tanks and armored vehicles, appear to mark a long-awaited counteroffensive that Ukraine hopes will retake territory and shore up allies’ resolve to keep supplying weapons.
President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the city of Kherson, trying to rally rescue crews. Russian forces shelled the city not long after his visit.
Even as new attacks have brought the war into Russia, the Russians have responded with force, raising the threat for the few civilians left in towns along the border.
“We were getting used to the shelling, but I’ve never seen a situation like this,” said one woman rescued in Kherson after a dam upstream was destroyed.
With Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the collapse of the Kakhovka dam, experts say that an external attack or even structural failure might explain the disaster, but that…
Experts suspect an explosion collapsed the dam on the Dnipro River. Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other, and residents downstream were forced to evacuate to escape the cascading waves.
Kyiv has not formally announced the start of operations. But Russia said that major Ukrainian attacks had begun in the Donetsk region and that it had repelled the assaults and inflicted casualties.
Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
With cross-border strikes, residents of the Russian region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horrors of war being waged at their doorstep.