Ukraine's military claims push into Russia-held Kherson
Ukraine claims to have pushed into Russian-held Kherson, ITV News' Ian Woods reports
Ukraine's military claims it has launched a major counteroffensive to recapture the Russian-held region of Kherson.
Russia captured the city and its surrounding region in the early days of the invasion.
But in recent weeks Ukraine has launched a succession of attacks aimed at cutting off Russian forces there from main supply routes.
Kherson is the biggest Ukrainian city occupied by Russian forces, and reports about Ukrainian forces preparing for a counteroffensive there and elsewhere in the region have circulated for weeks.
Russian-installed officials, citing Ukrainian rocket strikes, announced the evacuation of residents of nearby Nova Kakhovka — a city Kyiv’s forces frequently target—from their workplaces to bomb shelters on Monday.
While independent verification of battlefield action has been difficult, Britain’s Defence Ministry said in an intelligence report that several Ukrainian brigades had stepped up their artillery fire in front-line sectors across southern Ukraine.
The British also said that most of Russia’s units around Kherson “are likely under-manned and are reliant upon fragile supply lines” while its forces there are undergoing a significant reorganisation.
However the Moscow-appointed regional leader of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, dismissed reports of an offensive in the Kherson region as false.
He claimed the Ukrainian forces have suffered heavy losses in the area.
Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, cautioned against “super-sensational announcements” about a counteroffensive.
The Ukrainian military said on Tuesday evening that the Russians were shelling more than 15 settlements in the Kherson area and resorting to airstrikes.
In other battlefield reports, at least nine civilians were killed in more Russian shelling, Ukrainian officials said, from the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv to the northeastern industrial hub of Kharkiv, where five were killed in the city centre.
The fighting complicates what could be a treacherous trip from Kyiv to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, by an inspection team from the UN’s atomic energy agency.
The experts may have to pass through areas of active fighting, with no publicly announced cease-fire, to reach the Russian-occupied plant, where shelling has driven fears of a catastrophe. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the area over and over.
Nikopol, a city just across the Dnieper from the plant, again came under a barrage of heavy shelling, authorities said, with a bus station, stores and a children’s library damaged. And a Russian missile strike targeted the city of Zaporizhzhia, about 50 kilometres from the plant, Ukraine said.
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