Ukraine attack ‘kills four’ as Russian gains accelerate
At least four people have been killed in Ukrainian mortar fire on the Russian-occupied city of Nova Kakhovka in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, local officials say.
Another seven people were injured, according to the region’s Russian-appointed governor Vladimir Saldo who shared a picture of a destroyed minibus on Telegram.
The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office for the Kherson region has in turn launched an investigation into “enemy shelling of occupied Nova Kakhovka”.
According to the office, the bus was shot at by the Russian army at a bus stop.
Nova Kakhovka is located on the Russian-controlled southern bank of the lower reaches of the Dnipro River, which forms a de facto front line in the war.
Ukraine has been defending itself against a Russian invasion for more than two and a half years.
Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers say.
Russian troops swept through swathes of Ukraine in early 2022 before being pushed back to its east and south.
The 1000km front line has been largely static for two years until the latest, smaller-scale advances that began in July.
Ukraine hit Russia with US-produced ATACMS missiles twice over the last three days and Russia is preparing retaliatory measures, Russia’s defence ministry said on Tuesday.
It said both strikes targeted Russian forces’ positions in the Kursk region.
The first one took place on November 23, and two out of five missiles launched at a Russian S-400 air defence system hit the target, damaging its radar system.
In the second attack, on November 25, eight missiles were aimed at the Kursk-Vostochny airport, which also hosts a military air base.
One missile reached the target, wounding two soldiers, the ministry said in a statement.
The war is entering what some Russian as well as US and European officials say could be its most dangerous phase, with Russia reported to be using North Korean troops in Ukraine and Ukraine using foreign missiles to strike back inside Russia.
Russia, which like North Korea has not confirmed or denied the presence of the troops, used a hypersonic intermediate-range missile on Ukraine last week and Ukraine reported the biggest Russian drone attack on its territory so far on Tuesday.
“Russia has set new weekly and monthly records for the size of the occupied territory in Ukraine,” independent Russian news group Agentstvo said in a report.
The Russian army captured almost 235 sq km in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, it said.
Russian forces had taken 600 sq km in November, it added, citing data from DeepState which studies combat footage and provides front line maps.
President Vladimir Putin, who replaced his defence minister in May, has repeatedly said that Russian forces are advancing much more effectively – and that Russia will achieve all its aims in Ukraine, although he has not spelled them out in detail.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he believed Putin’s main objectives are to occupy the entire Donbas, spanning the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and oust Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region – parts of which they have controlled since August.
A source on Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday that Ukraine now held about 800 of the 1376 square kilometres of Kursk that they held initially and would hold it “for as long as is militarily appropriate”.
Russia controls 18 per cent of Ukraine including all of Crimea, just more than 80 per cent of Donbas and more than 70 per cent of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south, as well as about 3 per cent of the eastern Kharkiv region, according to open source maps.
The thrust of the advance has been in Donetsk region, with Russian forces pushing towards the town of Pokrovsk and into the town of Kurakhove.
Russia has increasingly encircled territory and then pummelled Ukrainian forces with artillery and glide bombs, according to Russian analysts.
Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), said on Tuesday that Russia held the complete strategic initiative on the battlefield.
with DPA
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