The Ukrainian authorities showed their optimism on Saturday, announcing that they were repelling the Russian offensives in the east, a priority for Moscow which they now predict will be defeated by the end of the year.
In southern Ukraine, “very difficult” negotiations are underway over the fate of the last defenders of the strategic port city of Mariupol, still intensely bombarded by the Russians according to kyiv.
Russian forces continued to strike Donbass, a strategic eastern region that their supporters have partly controlled since 2014, and which they have made their main objective since their withdrawal from the vicinity of kyiv at the end of March.
On Saturday morning, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense recorded around thirty bombardments in 24 hours in the Lugansk region, one of the two provinces of Donbass with Donetsk.
On Friday evening, the Ukrainian governor of Lugansk, Serguiï Gaïdaï, had reported “heavy fighting” on the border with the province of Donetsk. According to him, the Russians suffered numerous losses in equipment and personnel there.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also noted on Saturday a difficult situation “across the entire front line” in Donetsk, where towns and villages are without electricity after night bombardments.
But the Russians are unable to make a “significant take” in terms of cities or territories, said a US defense official on condition of anonymity. According to him, “Ukrainian artillery thwarts (their efforts) to gain ground, including their efforts to cross the Donets River”.
Ten Russian attacks were repelled in 24 hours around Donetsk and Lugansk, the Ukrainian general staff said on Saturday morning.
The Russians have been trying in particular for three weeks to cross this now strategic river which flows north of the town of Bilogorivka, in the Lugansk region.
In the near-deserted village, several buildings are still burning, the roads are littered with abandoned military equipment and artillery fire echoes nearby, an AFP team noted.
Only three soot-covered corners remain of a school that was bombed a week ago, a strike that kyiv touts as one of the most serious crimes committed by Russian forces since they began their invasion of Ukraine on February 24, with sixty civilians killed.
Further north, in the province of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian authorities have indicated that they have launched a “counter-offensive” in the region of Izium, a “hot spot” from where “the enemy is retreating” according to them.
“Our armed forces are repelling the enemy and residents are starting to return to their homes,” said Oleg Synegoubov, provincial governor, while calling on those who had fled the fighting not to return immediately to the liberated areas where, according to he, “the enemy has mined absolutely everything: courtyards of buildings, forests, roadsides, even children’s beds”.
“Turning”
The situation has apparently already reversed in Kharkiv, yet one of the priority targets for the Russians, but who have withdrawn from the city, according to the Ukrainian general staff.
“The gradual liberation of the Kharkiv region proves that we will leave no one to the enemy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted Friday evening in his daily message, announcing that the recovery of territories that fell into Russian hands was continuing.
“As of today, 1,015 localities have been liberated, six more in the last 24 hours,” he said.
These announcements persuade the Ukrainians that the war is turning to their advantage.
The war will see a “turning point” in August and Russia will be defeated “before the end of the year”, predicted the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, in an interview with the British channel Sky News broadcast Friday evening.
At the end of this war, “we will restore Ukrainian power in all the territories we have lost” since 2014, “including Donbass and Crimea”, he assured.
According to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Vladimir Putin “probably intends to annex southern and eastern Ukraine to the Russian Federation in the coming months”.
“Ukraine and its Western partners probably have only a reduced window of opportunity to support a counter-offensive in the territories occupied before” their annexation, according to this organization.
With a special thought for the thousand Ukrainian fighters entrenched in a maze of tunnels dating from the Soviet era under the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, a city 90% destroyed by Russian bombing.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk spoke of “negotiations with the enemy […] very difficult”. “We are currently negotiating (the exfiltration) of 38 seriously injured fighters. We are moving step by step”.
The Ukrainian general staff said on Saturday that the Russian army continued to carry out “large-scale artillery and air strikes” in the area.
Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment, one of the Ukrainian formations fighting in Azovstal, appealed for help from the United States “to evacuate our wounded and (that they) mobilize all efforts to help extract of our regiment.
Border tensions
In this context, the European Union pledged on Friday to provide additional aid of half a billion euros to support Ukraine’s fight, bringing it “to 2 billion euros in total”.
The recipe is “clear”, declared the head of EU diplomacy Josep Borrell on the occasion of a G7 meeting in Wangels, in the far north of Germany: we need “more of the same thing”, namely more economic sanctions against Russia, more support for kyiv, and also “continue to work to isolate Russia”.
The 27 members of the European Union have still not succeeded in agreeing to gradually stop their purchases of Russian oil, Hungary having considered the waiver obtained insufficient.
In their press release published at the end of this three-day meeting, the seven major economic powers (Germany, France, Italy, Canada, United States, Japan and United Kingdom) indicated that they wanted to “accelerate efforts” to “put an end to dependence on Russian energy”.
The G7 countries have promised to “extend economic sanctions” targeting Moscow to “sectors on which Russia is particularly dependent” while urging China “not to undermine” these measures.
They also indicated that they would “never” recognize the borders that Russia wants to impose by force in Ukraine, and called again on Belarus, a neighbor of Ukraine and an ally of Moscow, to “stop facilitating the intervention of Russia and to respect its international commitments”.
Saturday is also scheduled in Berlin for an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers on Ukraine.
Electricity exports from Russia to Finland ceased overnight from Friday to Saturday after an announcement to that effect by a Russian supplier, an official from the Finnish electricity grid operator told AFP.
This announcement comes against a backdrop of rising tensions between Moscow and Helsinki, which has announced its desire to join NATO “without delay” under the influence of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. The announcement of the Finnish candidacy is expected on Sunday.
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö called Vladimir Putin on Saturday about this candidacy, a conversation in which the two men considered it important to “avoid tensions”, Helsinki announced.
The end of Finland’s military neutrality would be a “mistake”, “since there is no threat to Finland’s security”, Vladimir Putin said during this interview, however, according to the Kremlin.