LONDON (Archyde.com) – Ukraine’s armed forces have ramped up artillery bombardment across southern Ukraine, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday, as its long-range precision strikes continued to disrupt Russian supplies.
The ministry added in its daily intelligence bulletin that Russia has been making efforts since the beginning of August to reinforce its forces on the western bank of the Dnipro River around Kherson.
On Monday, Oleksiy Aristovich, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Ukrainian forces had broken through Russian defenses in several sectors of the front line near Kherson as part of its counter-offensive in the south.
Aristovich added in a video interview on YouTube that Ukrainian forces are bombing the ferries used by Moscow to supply an enclave of Russian-occupied land on the western bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson region, Archyde.com news agency reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Russian forces to flee an attack by his forces near the southern city of Kherson, saying the Ukrainian army was retaking the country’s territory, although Russia said the attack had failed.
The Kyiv attack came following several weeks of relative stalemate in a war that has killed thousands, displaced millions, destroyed cities and triggered a global energy and food crisis amid unprecedented economic sanctions.
It also fueled fears of a radiological catastrophe as a result of the bombing near the Ukrainian nuclear plant Zaporizhia.
In his nightly speech on Monday evening, Zelensky vowed that Ukrainian forces would pursue the Russian army “to the border.” “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian army to flee. Go home,” he said. “Ukraine is taking back what belongs to it,” he added.
Officials in the Moscow-appointed local authority in the southern Ukrainian town of Nova Kakhovka told the RIA news agency that on Monday, Ukrainian forces fired a volley of missiles at the town, leaving it without water or electricity.
The town is located to the east of Kherson city, and is the target of a major counter-attack launched by Ukrainian forces with the support of advanced Western military aid, earlier (Monday), to regain lands in the south that Russian forces have controlled since their invasion six months ago.
The Russian Information Agency, quoting the Defense Ministry, said that the Ukrainian forces tried to launch an attack in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions, but incurred heavy casualties. “The enemy’s attack attempt failed miserably,” she added, but officials in the Moscow-appointed local authority told the agency that a barrage of Ukrainian missiles had cut off water and electricity in the Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka.
In Mykolaiv, officials and witnesses said that a new Russian bombing of the coastal city, which remained in the hands of the Ukrainians despite repeated Russian bombardment during the war, killed at least two people, injured regarding 24 others, and flattened homes.
The conflict is the largest attack on a European country since 1945, and has largely turned into a war of attrition, especially in the south and east, and has been dominated by artillery and air strikes. Russia captured large areas of the south in the first phase of the war.
The Ukrainian Southern Command said on Monday that its forces had started offensive movements in several directions, including the Kherson region, which is located to the north of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
A spokeswoman for the command, refusing to give details of the attack, said Ukraine had bombed more than a dozen sites in the past week and “undoubtedly weakened the enemy”, but that Russian forces in the south were still “very strong”.
