Dramatic footage has emerged showing Ukrainian troops storming a Russian trench in Humvees.
Filmed by a machine-gunner in one of the vehicles, the video shows them racing towards the Russian positions while laying down a ferocious amount of fire from the 50-calibre guns mounted upon them.
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Troops then dismount and advance upon the enemy positions.
Drone footage of the attack was also released by the Ukrainian military, which confirmed the troops were part of the 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade operating near Avdiyiv in the Donetsk region.
"We liberated Kherson - let's liberate Donetsk too!" it wrote in a Facebook post. "The other day, soldiers of the 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade named after Yakov Handziuk advanced the front line, seizing an enemy position in the Avdiyiv direction.
"The courage of our boys is simply off the scale!"
The attack is part of a significant uptick in Ukrainian attacks over the last week which on Saturday, President Zelensky confirmed is the long-awaited counteroffensive.
Relatively small but potentially significant gains in four areas of the 1,000-kilometer-long frontline have been made by Ukraine during the first week of a new phase of its counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territories.
Ukrainian offensive action has predominantly taken the form of probing attacks by mechanized infantry units, some newly trained by NATO allies, using new Western military equipment, including tanks and fighting vehicles.
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It has been focused on: an area of the Zaporizhzhia/Donetsk Oblast administrative boundary; southwestern Zaporizhzhia oblast; and the long-fought areas around Bakhmut and Avdiivka in central Donetsk oblast. Ukrainian losses for the first week of the new phase of the counteroffensive are unknown, but media have visually verified the permanent or temporary loss of at least 10 Ukrainian fighting vehicles.
The Ukrainian military issues no information on losses and generally does not comment on tactical aspects of operations that are underway, but some local units provide unattributed information.
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