With a week of warfare that has drastically altered the trajectory of the conflict, Ukrainian soldiers on Sunday intensified their counteroffensive in the east of the nation.
As the conflict entered its 200th day on Sunday, Ukraine’s swift effort to retake Russia-occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region compelled Moscow to evacuate its forces in order to save them from being encircled and leaving behind a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition in a hurried withdrawal.
The delighted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy taunted the Russians in a video message late Saturday, saying that “the Russian army in these days is showcasing the best that it can do – revealing its back.”
He published a video of Ukrainian troops raising the flag above Chkalovske, another town they took back from the Russians during the counteroffensive, on Sunday.
General Valerii Zaluzhnyy, commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, said on Sunday that the country has freed nearly 3,000 square kilometers, or 1,160 square miles, since the beginning of September. He claimed that the Ukrainian forces were now within 50 kilometers, or around 30 miles, from the Russian border.
Since they prevented a Russian effort to take the capital, Kyiv, at the commencement of the almost seven-month conflict, Ukrainian troops’ defeat of the Russians on the battlefield was marked by the Russians’ retreat. Moscow was caught off guard by Ukraine’s strike in the Kharkiv region because it had moved many of its soldiers from the region to the south in anticipation of the major Ukrainian counteroffensive there.
In an awkward attempt to save face, the Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday the troops’ withdrawal from Izyum and other areas in the Kharkiv region was intended to strengthen Russian forces in the neighboring Donetsk region to the south.
The claim sounded similar to the justification Russia gave for pulling back its forces from the Kyiv region earlier this year when they failed to take the capital.
The group of Russian forces around Izyum has been key for Moscow’s effort to capture the Donetsk region, and their pullback will now dramatically weaken the Russian capability to press its offensive to Ukrainian strongholds of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk just south.
Igor Strelkov, who led Russia-backed separatists in the early months of the conflict in the Donbas when it erupted in 2014, mocked the Russian Defense Ministry’s explanation of the retreat, suggesting that handing over Russia’s own territory near the border to Ukraine as a “contribution to Ukrainian settlement.”
The retreat drew angry comments from Russian military bloggers and nationalist commentators, who bemoaned it as a major defeat and urged the Kremlin to respond by stepping up war efforts. Many scathingly criticized Russian authorities for continuing with fireworks and other lavish festivities in Moscow that marked a city holiday on Saturday despite the debacle in Ukraine.
Just as the Russian forces were hastily pulling back from Izyum under Ukrainian fire, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the opening of a huge observation wheel at a Moscow park, a new transport link and a sports arena.
The action underlined the Kremlin’s effort to keep pretending that the war it calls a “special military operation” was going according to plan without affecting the situation in the country.
Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov criticized the festivities in Moscow as a grave political mistake.
“The fireworks in Moscow on a tragic day of Russia’s military defeat will have extremely serious political consequences,” Markov wrote on his messaging app channel. “Authorities mustn’t celebrate when people are mourning.”
In a sign of potential rift in the Russian leadership, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, said that the retreat from the Kharkiv region resulted from the Russian military leadership’s blunders.
“They have made mistakes and I think they will draw the necessary conclusions,” Kadyrov said. “If they don’t make changes in the strategy of conducting the special military operation in the next day or two, I will be forced to contact the leadership of the Defense Ministry and the leadership of the country to explain the real situation on the ground.”
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in televised comments Saturday that the Russians have been cut off from supply lines and predicted more gains.
“It will be like an avalanche,” he said, predicting a Russian fallback. “One line of defense will shake, and it will fall.”
Ukraine has made progress, but the U.S. The chairman of NATO and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both issued warnings on Friday that the conflict would probably last for months. Blinken warned that the conflict was at a crucial stage and encouraged Western allies of Ukraine to continue their assistance through what may be a challenging winter.
The biggest nuclear power station in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, was reconnected to Ukraine’s energy system on Sunday, enabling engineers to turn down its last operable reactor in an effort to prevent a radioactive catastrophe while war rages nearby.
The facility had been running in “island mode” for a few days before, with just one of its six reactors producing enough energy to run cooling systems and other essential machinery.