Slowly, but making progress, Ukraine assured yesterday that it is recovering territory from Russian troops. Specifically, three more square kilometers in one week in the vicinity of Bakhmut. In addition, it resists the Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region and continues to bombard Moscow with sporadic drone attacks.
The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had shot down two drones heading for the Russian capital yesterday. The fall of the debris caused two injuries.
Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said Ukrainian forces were advancing south of Bakhmut, a town of 70,000 inhabitants before the dispute that for months became a paradigm of the war conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Russian forces, led by the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, conquered this stronghold in the Ukrainian province of Donetsk (in the Donbass) after more than half a year of bloody fighting in what has so far been the most violent battle of this war.
According to Maliar, the Ukrainians have “liberated” three more square kilometers south of the city in a week. During its counteroffensive, Ukraine has retaken a total of 43 square kilometers around Bakhmut, but the town remains under Russian control. The Ukrainian military strategy is to continue advancing and surround the Russian troops inside the city.
Russia, for its part, concentrates its offensive on the front line in the Kharkiv region, specifically the area of ??the city of Kúpiansk. But Kyiv says its troops are resisting the attacks. Maliar acknowledged on Ukrainian television that the situation is “difficult”, since “the enemy does not abandon his plans to move forward” in this area. “We trust our defenders, but (the situation) is very difficult for them, and the enemy is not advancing”, he said.
On Russian territory, the conflict takes the form of military drones. For the fourth day in a row, Ukrainian drones crossed the border and managed to reach Moscow, where they tested their air defenses. These worked well and shot down two of these devices early in the morning, which failed to reach the capital. The first was eliminated with electronic warfare systems in the village of Pokrovskoe, 75 kilometers west of Moscow. The second, with traditional media about the district of Istra, about 56 kilometers west of the capital. Its debris fell on a country house and injured two people, one of whom had to be hospitalized, Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobiov said.
As a preventive measure, activity at the four Moscow airports, Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky, was interrupted. According to the Russian aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, 45 passenger and 2 transport flights had to be altered, with delays or diversions to other destinations.
Since Russia said in May that two drones had tried to attack the Kremlin itself, the arrival of these devices in the Russian capital has become more frequent. A day earlier, anti-aircraft defenses had intercepted one in the Stupino district, about a hundred kilometers south of Moscow.
Yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defense also reported the interception of two drones in Belgorod Oblast, bordering Ukraine. And the governor of Kaluga, an oblast neighboring Moscow, assured that an unmanned aircraft had been shot down in that region. According to Mash, a news channel on the Telegram app, the drone crashed into a military airfield and caused a crater and a fire, which was quickly extinguished. There were no victims in these cases.
