Ukraine announced Thursday that it has breached Russian defenses and recaptured a city of 27,000 in the east, while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in kyiv with new $2.8 billion in military aid.
“Things are as they should be. The Ukrainian flag flies over a liberated Ukrainian city, under the Ukrainian sky,” Volodymyr Zelensky said, alongside a video showing Ukrainian soldiers marching in the city captured by the Russian army in early March. .
While Ukrainian troops have been leading a counteroffensive since last week, in particular to retake the occupied Kherson region (south), the general staff had scored a series of successes earlier in the day.
In the Kharkiv region, which borders Russia in the northeast, Ukrainian forces claim to have broken through Russian defenses 50 kilometers deep. In southern Ukraine, kyiv forces say they have penetrated “deeply”, up to “several tens of kilometers”, Russian lines and “liberated several localities”, according to Oleksiï Gromov, a senior Ukrainian state-major.
“We are seeing clear and real progress on the ground”
These gains, which cannot be immediately independently verified, would be the biggest for Ukraine since the withdrawal of Russian troops from kyiv in late March.
They are announced when the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, makes a surprise visit to Kyiv, the second since the beginning of the Russian invasion, with the promise of a new aid tranche.
“It is still very early days, but we see clear and real progress on the ground, especially in the area around Kherson, but also interesting developments in eastern Donbass,” the diplomat said.
The progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive is “regular”, also greeted the chief of the US General Staff, Mark Milley, at the end of a meeting of Ukraine’s allies organized at the US base in Ramstein (Germany) and aimed at coordinating military aid to Kyiv
Source: BFM TV
