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Ukraine It said it had breached enemy lines in several places near the southern city of Kherson as it fueled a new campaign to retake territory, while Moscow said Kyiv’s counter-offensive was due to Russian shelling of the port city of Nikolayev. has failed.
Kyiv’s move comes after weeks of relative stalemate over a war that has killed thousands, displaced millions, destroyed cities and sparked a global energy and food crisis amid unprecedented economic sanctions.
“Today I should have noticed that (Russia’s) defenses were breached within hours,” said Oleksi Arestovich, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
He added that Ukrainian troops were shelling a ferry that Moscow used to supply a small Russian-occupied area on the west bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region.
The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier on Monday that Ukrainian troops had attempted to launch an offensive in the Mykolaiv and Kherson districts, but caused heavy casualties, RIA Novosti reported.
“The enemy’s offensive attempt failed miserably,” it said.
But a Russian-appointed local authority official told RIA Novosti that a flurry of rockets in Ukraine left the Russian-occupied town of Novakakhovka without water or electricity.
Reuters Battlefield reports could not be independently verified.
New Russian shelling of Nikolayev remains in Ukrainian hands despite repeated Russian bombings during the war, city officials and witnesses said on Monday, killing at least two people, wounding about 24 and destroying homes.
One Reuters Reporters reported that a strike directly hit a home next to a school, killing a woman.
The owner of the property, Olexandr Shulga, said he had lived there his whole life and his wife died while buried in the rubble.
“It came, the shock wave came. It destroyed everything,” he told Reuters.
The conflict, the largest attack on a European country since 1945, has essentially turned into a war of attrition, mainly in the south and east, marked by artillery and air strikes. Russia occupied large swathes of the South very early on.
Ukraine’s Southern Command said on Monday that its forces had begun offensives in several southern directions, including the Kherson region in the northern part of the Russian-annexed Crimea peninsula.
Ukraine has hit more than 10 locations in the past week, “without doubt weakening the enemy,” according to a spokesman who declined to give details of the attack, adding that Russia’s forces in the south remain “pretty strong.”
nuclear safety mission
More than six months after the invasion, Ukraine has been using advanced Western-supplied weapons to attack Russian ammunition depots and wreak havoc on supply lines. Russia said it was launching a “special military operation” in Ukraine to get rid of nationalists and protect Russian-speaking communities. Ukraine and the West have described Russia’s actions as an unprovoked war of aggression.
The world is scrambling to avoid a disaster at the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, with both sides accusing shelling of its vicinity.
Ukraine said an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission to the facility, captured by Russian forces in March but still carried out by Ukrainian staff, arrived in Kyiv on Monday and began work in the coming days.
This satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies shows armored personnel carriers near the reactors of the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in Ukraine on August 29, 2022. (Satellite image © 2022 Maxar Technologies via AP)
Led by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, the mission will assess physical damage, assess working conditions and inspect safety and security systems, the Vienna-based group said.
It will also “perform emergency safeguards activities,” referring to tracking nuclear material.
The Kremlin said the IAEA’s mandate was “necessary” and urged the international community to pressure Ukraine to ease military tensions at the plant. The Russian foreign ministry said the mission must work in a politically neutral manner.
The United Nations, the United States and Ukraine have called for the withdrawal of military equipment and personnel from the complex to ensure it is not a target.
“We continue to believe that a controlled shutdown of the Zaporozhye nuclear reactor would be the safest and least risky option in the near term,” said John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
But the Kremlin again ruled out an evacuation from the site.
Liliia Vaulina, 22, one of many civilians fleeing Enerhodar to the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, some 50 kilometers upstream from the factory, said, She hopes the IAEA’s mandate will lead to the demilitarization of the region.
“I think they’ll stop bombing,” she told Reuters.
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