Russia assured on Monday that it had repelled a major Ukrainian offensive in eastern Ukraine on which kyiv remains silent, maintaining the mystery around the great attack prepared for months to reconquer its occupied territories.
In a press release without much detail, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have countered since the morning of June 4 attacks on five sectors of the front “in the southern direction of the Donetsk region”.
“The enemy has not achieved its goal” of breaking through the Russian lines, he said, citing heavy enemy losses and broadcasting images of Ukrainian tanks being destroyed, but saying nothing about the place fighting or Russian losses.
According to the statement, the Russian Chief of Staff and commander of operations in Ukraine, General Valery Gerasimov, “was during this period at one of the forward command posts in this direction”.
A Russian occupation official in the Zaporizhia region, Vladimir Rogov, told him about Ukrainian attacks on Russian positions on Monday morning, according to the official TASS news agency.
The Ukrainian authorities did not mention these events. They had warned that they would not reveal anything about the plans or the timetable for the offensive announced for months to reconquer the occupied territories in the south and east of the country.
Silence of Kyiv
A video was thus broadcast on social networks showing soldiers with a finger on the mouth, images accompanied by the slogan “Plans love silence”.
Quoting rock band Depeche Mode, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted the video on Sunday, along with a line from a song: “Words are really useless, they can only do harm.”
Still, Russian experts and soldiers expect Ukrainian forces to step up attacks on enemy lines to discover weaknesses there, before launching the bulk of the troops.
This was the scenario of the month of September 2022 when the Ukrainian army secretly prepared an assault which ended up leading to the reconquest of almost the entire Kharkiv region.
Alexander Kots, a war correspondent loyal to the Kremlin, noted that fighting had been going on since dawn on Monday in the Vougledar area, in the south of the Donetsk region, but also further north around Soledar and Bakhmout. , cities occupied by the Russians after months of bloody battle.
For him however, it is not yet a major assault.
“(The Ukrainians) have not yet sent their main forces into battle. And when it does, it could be in a whole other sector” of the front, he noted.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, speaking in New Delhi, noted fighting near Bakhmout and in the southern Donetsk region, without commenting on their strategic significance.
“I think the right thing to do is let the Ukrainians communicate about their operation,” he said.
Uncertainty
For the past two weeks, attacks and bombings have been increasing in the Russian region of Belgorod, bordering Ukraine, during fighting between the Russian army and pro-Ukrainian Russian fighters.
In the latest operation on Sunday, one such pro-Ukrainian group dubbed the “Freedom for Russia Legion” took prisoners who are to be handed over to kyiv. A dozen detainees, including two injured, are visible in a video.
This is the first time that Russians have been captured on Russian territory.
The governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov even, exceptionally, mentioned possible negotiations, but the pro-Ukrainian fighters assured in their video that the Russian official had not come to the meeting point.
Fighting has been concentrated in recent days around Novaya Tavoljanka and Chebekino, near the border, forcing thousands of civilians to flee to Belgorod, the regional capital.
“We are in a terrible state. But we hold on, we try to be strong, because we have children […]. But what will happen next? Of course, we don’t know,” Irina Bourlakova, a displaced person who came to seek humanitarian aid in a reception center, told AFP.
This 30-year-old woman fled Chebekino with her husband and son. They lived in the center of the city hit in recent days by artillery fire of unprecedented intensity.
In the night from Sunday to Monday, the Belgorod region was again targeted by strikes and a drone attack which injured one person and damaged an energy infrastructure site, according to Mr. Gladkov.
Ukraine assures that it is not piloting these attacks.