Ukraine official statement: UAF has stopped Russian Federation (RF) attack in the north, Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) advances in the east
UAF forces have brought RF attacks to a full stop in the northern half of the country, while the situation to the south is more fluid, a senior government official said on Wednesday.
Oleksii Arestovych, a Presidential administration spokesman, said Ukrainian deep strikes and counterattacks brought all RF forward movement to a halt in the Chernhiv and Sumy sectors. RF forces have taken substantial losses and are reorganizing, but UAF regular forces and partisans are hunting down survivors, he said.
The city of Kharkiv is under extremely heavy fire, Arestovych said, with RF forces using all manner of weapons from air-dropped bombs to artillery to rockets. Most of the strikes are hitting civilian homes or businesses, per an RF strategy to “break the will” of the city’s population, he said. UAF regular and territorial forces are still fighting for the city house to house, and Kharkiv has effectively become “A 21st Century Stalingrad”, Arestovych said.
UAF forces in the east are holding their ground and at one location, the village Horlivka, they have advanced and digging in. This confirmed earlier reports UAF forces had captured the locality. It was the first instance of UAF forces capturing ground previously controlled by the Russian-controlled enclave “LNDPR”.
In the south, the city Mariupol remains under UAF control, while street battles are in progress in Kherson and Mykolaiv, where the RF landed some troops by air. Arestovych said UAF elements were systematically attacking these RF forces and that most should be eliminated by the end of the day.
Arestovych singled out the situation around the city of Enerhodar as worrying, because of the proximity of RF troops to a nuclear power station there. At present RF columns in the vicinity are stopped, he said.
Citing a flood of images in Ukrainian conventional and social media as evidence, Arestovych claimed RF soldiers are “massively” quitting their vehicles to avoid having to attack into the teeth of Ukrainian defenses. He claimed that RF losses to date have been so high, as to force the Kremlin to mobilize military institute students as reserves and replacements.
Despite wide but unconfirmed media reports that the Belarusian army might move to support its embattled RF allies, at present, Arestovych said, Ukrainian intelligence has seen insufficient evidence Minsk intends to intervene in the war.
