Ukrainians continue to push back Russian troops in east and south

Ukraine’s military is steadily pushing back Russian forces across two heavily fortified fronts in the east and south of the country, as it recaptures territory claimed by Vladimir Putin as part of Russia.

In a map published as part of its daily briefing on Tuesday, Russia’s defence ministry showed its forces had retreated about 30km in the southern Kherson region from Zolota Balka to Dudchany in a day and ceded almost all of what little territory it still held in the eastern Kharkiv region.

Ukraine reinforcements including armoured vehicles were seen on Tuesday moving into the eastern Donbas region towards Lyman, a railway hub won back three days ago, according to local reports. They were heading to Lysychansk, which has been held by Russia for more than three months and is the focus of the Ukrainian counter-offensive efforts in the east.

About 600km to the south, Ukrainian soldiers forced well-entrenched Russian troops into what a US official referred to as a “defensive crouch”. The heavy fighting has continued in towns such as Dudchany, crucial stops to the shipbuilding city of Kherson, which fell into Russia’s hands days into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.

The simultaneous advances have allowed Ukraine to regain strategic territory. They have also shown Kyiv’s ability to repurpose captured Russian weapons and recently arrived western arms against an enemy still waiting for newly mobilised troops.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said in an evening video address to the nation on Tuesday: “Today we have good news from the front line . . . the Ukrainian army is making quite fast and powerful movements in the south of our country.

“Dozens of settlements have already been exempted from the Russian pseudo-referendum this week alone. This is in Kherson region, Kharkiv region, Luhansk region and Donetsk region together,” Zelenskyy said, referring to a series of plebiscites staged by the Russians to allow them to claim the annexation of occupied territories.

Ukrainian officials have been wary of discussing operational details but western allies briefed on the advance have described the operations, which target individual Russian formations thinly stretched over vast distances with an overwhelming force that travels rapidly through the night.

“In the vicinity of Kherson, we continue to see deliberate and calibrated operations by the Ukrainians as they continue their offensive,” said a senior US military official. “The [Russians] are fighting, obviously, but they are in a defensive approach.”

In the east, the Ukrainian military was “picking off the comparatively easier targets to seize some initiative”, another western diplomat said, avoiding sending more troops to become bogged down in cities such as Bakhmut, where they have faced off against Russian artillery for months without much effect.

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Russia is attempting to bolster its forces at the front lines with what Putin has called a “partial” mobilisation of the army’s reserves. Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, on Tuesday said Russia had called up 200,000 men.

The measure, however, has proved unpopular at home, prompting hundreds of thousands of people to leave the country and leaving the Kremlin to shift the blame on to local officials.

The movement on both fronts has been gruelling, with no clear updates on casualties on either side. That compares with a counter-offensive in the north-east last month in which Ukraine forces pushed almost all Russian troops back to the border within days. “In the north-east, the Ukrainians moved through Russian defences like Swiss cheese, as opposed to the south, where it will be more difficult,” a second US military official said.

The Ukrainian offensive in the south towards Kherson had clearly “gained some momentum”, according to a western official, adding that even if it became militarily untenable for Russian forces, it was “unlikely that the Russian leadership would sanction a full pullout . . . for political reasons”.

As a result, the official added, the “situation in the south could become increasingly messy”, with an estimated 20,000 Russian troops on the west bank of the Dnipro potentially growing “desperate . . . with their backs to the river”.

The setbacks have proved inescapable on Russian state television, which has attempted to blame Russia’s losses on western support for Ukraine.

“Why do we advance metre by metre when they advance village by village? Why are things going better for them now?” Olga Skabeyeva, host of a news talk show, asked on Tuesday.

Igor Girkin, a former intelligence officer who led Russia’s first incursion in the Donbas region in 2014 and has been critical of the army’s conduct of the invasion, on Tuesday said Ukraine “had the advantage in everything and is even using aviation” on the southern front, adding that there were reports of further Ukrainian progress in the east.

Russian forces along both fronts were “exhausted”, said Serhiy Kuzan, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence ministry. It follows months of attacks on Russian command centres, resupply lines and weapons caches by US-supplied Himars, guided rockets that can reach deep behind the front lines.

“They are not operating in a co-ordinated fashion because we chose the right tactics to destroy their communications and supply lines,” he said.

The Ukrainian advance came as Putin prepared on Tuesday to sign into law the annexation of four Ukrainian territories into the Russian Federation. Ukrainian troops have pushed the front line deep into two of those territories, and are gaining momentum while Russia struggles to train, arm and mobilise newly conscripted troops.

US intelligence had not seen a “large-scale” movement of Russian forces despite the recent battlefield losses, one official said. The only part of the country where Russia was mounting an offence was in Bakhmut, in the mineral-rich, eastern Donbas region, they added.