Ukraine says Russians are not advancing but well entrenched

Aug 3 (Reuters) – Russian forces have not advanced on the front but are entrenched in heavily mined areas they control, making it difficult for Ukrainian troops to move east and south, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.

Russian accounts of front-line fighting said 12 Ukrainian attacks had been repulsed in the Donetsk region, a focal point of Russian advances for months.

Much of the Russian military activity focused on airstrikes that damaged grain infrastructure in the Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail. Russia’s Defense Ministry also said its forces had destroyed a Ukrainian naval drone attempting to attack a Russian warship escorting a civilian vessel in the Black Sea.

Ukrainian forces launched a campaign in June to retake occupied areas and have been pushing south toward the Azov Sea to cut a land bridge between occupied eastern Ukraine and the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.

kyiv also says it has retaken areas near Bakhmut, an eastern city taken by Russian forces in May after months of fighting.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces “quite persistently tried to stop our advance in the Bakhmut sector. Without success.”

Russian forces, he wrote on the Telegram messaging app, were reinforcing reserves and equipment in three areas further north, where heavy fighting has also been taking place in recent weeks.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security Council, said Russian forces had plenty of time in months of occupation to prepare defenses and lay extensive minefields.

“The enemy has prepared very well for these events,” he told national television. “The number of mines in the territory that our troops have recaptured is completely insane. On average, there are three, four, five mines per square meter.” do not rush as human lives are at stake.

“No one can set deadlines for us, except ourselves… there is no fixed schedule,” he said. “I have never used the term counteroffensive. There are military operations and they are complex, difficult and depend on many factors”.

The Russian Defense Minister, in his account of the fighting,

He said Ukrainian forces had made unsuccessful attempts to advance in several sectors in both the south and north of the Donetsk region.

He also said Russian forces had launched attacks on towns around Bakhmut, including Kurdyumovka on the city’s southern outskirts and Chasiv Yar, the first major city to the west.

Reporting by Ron Popeski. Edited by Gerry Doyle

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.