“Our soldiers remain steadfast in the defense of the Avdivka area,” Oleksandr Tarnavski, commander of the strategic operational group in that region, wrote on his Telegram account.
According to the Ukrainian general, Russian forces carried out unsuccessful offensive actions in Avdivka, Novokalinove (about twenty kilometers north of Avdivka), Opytne (about seven kilometers south of Avdivka) and Pervomaiski (in the northeastern region of Kharkov).
“In total, enemy losses amount to 483 people,” Tarnavski said, adding to heavy Russian losses in recent weeks, although the figures could not immediately be independently confirmed.
In terms of military equipment, Ukraine claims to have destroyed 11 Russian tanks, four armored fighting vehicles, six artillery systems, two ‘drones’, eight cars and two ammunition depots, the aforementioned report said.
Since October, Russia has focused its efforts on trying to encircle the Ukrainian city of Avdivka, but the Ukrainian military says the Russians are suffering huge losses.
Also today, a Ukrainian attack left nine people dead in an occupied region of southern Ukraine, a local official from the Russian occupation authorities said.
“Nine dead people were recovered from the rubble,” said Vladimir Saldo, who was put in charge by Moscow of the occupied territories in this part of southern Ukraine, interviewed by the Rossiya 24 television channel.
Earlier, another element of the occupation authorities accused the Ukrainian armed forces of attacking civilian infrastructure in the village of Chaplinka, located in the occupied zone of the Kherson region, in the south of the country.
Konstantin Bassiouk then gave a tally of seven dead and seven injured and said doctors were “fighting to save the lives” of two people.
The attack hit “pension fund facilities and a labor office,” it added, citing information that also could not be independently confirmed.
Chaplinka is located about a hundred kilometers from Kherson, the capital of the province of the same name, which was recaptured by Ukrainian troops in November 2022.
Russia still controls much of the region and fighting between the two armies is fierce.
After twenty months of war, with an estimated hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, and with the approaching arrival of winter, the situation in Ukraine remains at an impasse.
The two warring sides entered the fray in fierce bloody fighting, but with little significant territorial progress in recent weeks in the east and south of the country.
The military offensive that Russia launched in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 caused the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II (1939-1945), according to the most recent UN data.
The Russian invasion – justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the need to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine for Russia’s security – was condemned by most of the international community, which responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and impose political and economic sanctions on Russia.
Source: DN
