“We still have three localities (to be taken over) on the Kinbourne peninsula” before completely liberating the region of Mikolaiv (south), regional governor Vitali Kim said on Tuesday.
On Monday, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army’s Southern Command, Natalia Goumenyuk, said that “a military operation is currently underway on the Kinbournska peninsula, ‘in silent mode'”.
“We are continuing the combat work. As soon as there is a result, we will report it,” she said, without giving further details on the ongoing hostilities.
The capture by the Ukrainian army of the last three villages in the Mikolaiv region from the hands of the Russians would mark an important victory for kyiv, a few days following having driven the Moscow troops from Kherson, the main city occupied until then.
These three small localities are geographically a few kilometers in front of southern Ukraine, controlled by kyiv, at the tip of a piece of land nestled at the end of the left bank of the Dnieper.
Russia had conquered this area in the early days of its invasion of Ukraine in late February.
Crimea hit by ‘drone attack’
Ukraine’s Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula was targeted by a drone attack on Tuesday, with Russian forces there “on high alert”, Kremlin-installed authorities said.
“There is an attack with drones,” the governor of the Sevastopol administrative region in Crimea, installed by Moscow, Mikhail Razvojayev, said on Telegram. “Our air defense forces are working right now.”