Four villages recaptured on the southern front and an advance of a few hundred meters on the flanks of Bakhmut is what Ukrainian forces appear to have achieved after a week of starting a counter-offensive that President Volodymyr Zelensky only dared to confirm on Saturday , precisely when the Russian Ministry of Defense disseminated images of tanks (presumably Western Leopards) destroyed as they advanced over Russian fortifications. Maybe there were ten of them; Kyiv does not report its losses.
The conquests confirmed between the weekend and Monday, however, were aired by official sources. These are the villages of Neskuchne, Storojove, Makarivka and Blahodatne. On their own they do not explain anything and together they represent an advance of around five kilometres. Further ahead are new Russian defense lines and four more towns.
As if this was not enough to defend themselves, the Russians would have destroyed a small dam in a fifth place, Kliuchove. This is what the military spokesman for the sector, Valery Xerxen, told the newspaper Ukraínskaia Pravda, to hinder the Ukrainian advance. The Mokri Yalí River would have overflowed on both banks, along one of which runs a road that leads to the Sea of Azov, near Mariupol, still about 125 kilometers from the Ukrainian positions.
The value of this small Ukrainian advance must be considered in relation to what happened a few days ago, which did not go so well.
The attack on the southern front began a week ago in two axes, one from Velika Novosilka, which is the one that is succeeding – as it breaks a salient in the area occupied by the Russians – and the other from Oríkhiv , one hundred kilometers to the west. The objective of both would be to break the corridor occupied by the Russians between the Donbass and Crimea.
The axis of Oríkhiv – a city that yesterday suffered a Russian attack with guided bombs that left at least one dead and one injured – is also very important, because it would end up leading to the city of Melitopol. From the Oríkhiv sector the Ukrainians managed to penetrate last week apparently only about five kilometers, as during the attack from Velika Novosilka, but they were repulsed. That's where Russian drones took pictures of tanks and armored vehicles destroyed, apparently by mines. According to The Economist, Ukraine lost "dozens of soldiers".
It is precisely twenty kilometers from Oríkhiv, not far from the great reservoir of the Dnieper River – overflowed by the explosion of the Novà Kakhovka dam – where new movements could occur. The Ukrainians are also being attacked here, or so it was deduced from the information of the Institute for the Study of War in which they cite Russian military bloggers, who are usually more objective than the official sources in Moscow.
The other fronts, meanwhile, are equally active, in the north of the Donbass, in the sectors of Bakhmut and Kreminnà, and in the south, in Marinka and Avdíivka. The Russian artillery continues to hammer and the aviation registers a little more intense activity.
More worrying, given what has happened with the Nová Kakhovka dam, is the warning - or speculation - from the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, that Russia plans to evacuate the city of Armiansk, in Crimea, right next to the reservoir where the water supply channel from the Dnieper empties, which originates just above the Nova Kakhovka dike, now destroyed.
The reason for the evacuation would be that explosives have been placed in an ammonia production plant. The blast would release two tons of poison and, the SBU claims, would present it as Ukrainian sabotage. Ukrainian troops, it must be remembered, are a long way from Crimea.
