While Ukrainian authorities declared an operation to free an occupied territory in the south of the nation, Russian forces conducted major missile attacks on Ukraine’s Kyiv and Chernihiv districts on Thursday.
Oleksiy Kuleba, the regional governor of Kyiv, said on Telegram that an “infrastructure object” was struck early on Thursday morning during a targetted attack on a community in the Vyshgorod district of the area. No casualties were immediately apparent, if any.
About 12 kilometers separate the center of Kiev from Vyshhgorod. Kuleba connected the strikes to Thursday’s first-ever celebration of the Day of Statehood in Ukraine.
“Russia, with the help of missiles, is mounting revenge for the widespread popular resistance, which the Ukrainians were able to organize precisely because of their statehood,” Kuleba told Ukrainian television. “Ukraine has already broken Russia’s plans and will continue to defend itself.”
The governor of Chernihiv, Vyacheslav Chaus, said that several missiles were fired at the village of Honcharivska from Belarusian territory.
After failing to take either region, Russian soldiers departed from the Kyiv and Chernihiv districts months ago. A day after openly urging Russian forces to “liberate Russian towns built by the Russian people — Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lutsk,” pro-Kremlin separatist leader Denis Pushilin resumed his attacks on the regions.
According to Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, a barrage of shelling occurred overnight. One person was hurt when shots were fired at the southern city of Mykolaiv.
In the meantime, the Ukrainian military persisted in launching counterattacks in the seized Kherson area in the south, Wednesday’s offensive hitting a crucial bridge across the Dnieper River.
Oleksiy Arestovich, Ukraine’s presidential advisor, was reported by Ukrainian media on Thursday as stating that the operation to free Kherson “has already begun.” Russian troops would be forced to choose between three options: “retreat, if feasible, surrender, or be annihilated,” according to Arestovich, who said that Kyiv’s military planned to isolate them there.
In televised remarks on Wednesday, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said he was “conservative” in gauging the potential counteroffensive’s timing. He said that “the adversary is now concentrating the maximum number (of soldiers) precisely in the Kherson direction” and remarked, “I truly would want it to be much faster.”
“A very large-scale movement of their troops has begun, they are gathering additional forces,” Danilov warned.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson, according to the British military, is “gaining momentum” as of Thursday.
“Their forces have highly likely established a bridgehead south of the Ingulets River, which forms the northern boundary of Russian-occupied Kherson,” the British Defense Ministry said on Thursday.
In addition, it stated that Ukraine had damaged at least three of the Dnieper River bridges, “which Russia relies upon to feed the territories under its control.” The British Defense Ministry came to the conclusion that the six-tenths-of-a-mile-long Antonivsky bridge, which Ukrainian troops attacked on Wednesday, is likely to be “unusable.”
At least five people have been killed and nine more have been injured in the previous 24 hours of Russian bombardment of cities and villages, according to the Ukrainian presidential office on Thursday morning. All of the victims were in the eastern Donetsk area.
The Donetsk area has seen increased fighting in recent weeks. It has been worse recently as Russian military have reportedly resumed operations after taking over the nearby Luhansk province.
Early on Thursday morning, a missile impacted a residential building in Toretsk, damaging two stories. “Once more, missile fear. We are not going to give up. We’re not going to back down, “Regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, stated on Telegram.
Russian forces are said to be concentrating their efforts on seizing the cities of Bakhmut and Siversk in the Donetsk region, according to analysts with the Institute for the Study of War.
“Russian forces have committed enough resources to conduct near-daily ground assaults and to seize territory on these two axes but have been unable to sustain a similar offensive operational tempo or to make similar territorial gains elsewhere in Ukraine,” the Institute said.