“Active fighting” raged Friday in the Zaporizhia region of southern Ukraine, according to a Russian occupation official, with observers seeing the beginnings of an expected counter-offensive from Kiev, which remains of its silent side.
“At present, active fighting has resumed in the region between Orekhovo (the Russian name of Orikhiv, editor’s note) and Tokmak”, at the level of the current front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces, indicated Vladimir Rogov on Telegram.
He did not give more details, but according to Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for Russian public television, who runs a Telegram channel followed by more than a million people, Russian and Ukrainian “artillery” is at work. , the Kiev troops being on the offensive according to him.
“Long and hard fighting is underway,” he wrote in the morning, saying “the front line is stable.”
“The enemy is making incredible efforts, (carrying out) attacks. In vain. Ours hold. The front line is preserved, ”he assured, unverifiable claims from independent sources at this stage.
The day before, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that his men had repelled a Ukrainian offensive in the Zaporizhia region overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, without giving the precise location of the attack.
According to Dmitry Rogozin, a senior Russian official, the Moscow army “repelled the first attack”. “But the enemy has not yet introduced its main forces”, he tempered, while Ukraine would have gathered “600 tanks” in the area according to him.
The leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigojine, said on Thursday that he saw in the latest “offensive actions” confirmed by Kiev “the start of a counter-offensive” that the Ukrainian army has been announcing for months.
drone strike
In its daily bulletin published Friday morning, the Ukrainian army did not report on these fights.
“The adversary remains on the defensive,” the Ukrainian command simply wrote about the front in the Zaporizhia region.
According to observers, the Ukrainian army could seek, in this region, to attempt a breakthrough towards Tokmak, in occupied territory 40 km south of Orikhiv, an important logistical node for the Russian forces and last important locality with the occupied cities from Melitopol and Berdyansk.
The Ukrainian general staff, however, remains silent on its real intentions, maintaining the vagueness on its strategy, while its army is now equipped with modern Western equipment.
In recent weeks, Ukraine appeared to test Russian positions along the front line, from south to east, a way experts say to fuel uncertainty before launching a decisive assault to retake the whole territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea annexed in 2014.
Moscow swears for its part that it wants to take the whole of the Donbass in the east of the country.
On the Russian side of the border, three people were slightly injured on Friday when a drone fell on an apartment building in the city of Voronezh, some 200 km from the border with Ukraine, according to the regional governor, Alexander Gusev.
It is the first incident of its kind reported in Voronezh, a city of more than a million inhabitants, in more than 15 months of Russian offensive in Ukraine, while Russia has been the target for weeks of a growing number of drone attacks that Moscow blames on Ukrainian forces.
Slight decline in Kherson
In Ukraine, in the neighboring region of Zaporijjia, that of Kherson, the consequences of the floods caused by the destruction Tuesday of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper river were still visible Friday morning.
The water in this dam “has dropped by 4.7 m” since Tuesday, warned the Ukrainian operator of the dam, Ukrhydroenergo, but according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Thursday evening, it continues to cool the Zaporijjia nuclear power plant, located 150 km upstream.
In the city of Kherson itself, the water level began to drop “for the first time” in four days, according to Laura Moussiïane, an employee of the local meteorological agency.
“If yesterday the water was 5 meters above normal, today it is at a lower level,” she explains.
“It’s a very good trend,” she rejoiced, four days with the spectacular destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which prompted several thousand civilians to flee the flooded areas.
But the situation is still delicate in the localities around Kherson, such as in Chornobaivka.
“The water has already entered the houses and the streets. Every two hours I go out to see if the water continues to rise,” Tatiana Ioenko, a 45-year-old resident, told AFP.
kyiv and Moscow accused each other on Thursday of carrying out strikes on areas where evacuation operations for residents of Kherson are taking place.
Evacuations continue “under the bombardments […] uninterrupted” by Ukrainian forces, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.