By Olena Harmash
KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine's top commander said on Monday that Russian forces were carrying out relentless attacks in an effort to advance on the city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub in the east, and that active fighting was taking place along the entire front line.
Nearly 29 months after the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has stepped up its mobilization efforts to address manpower shortages and has been supplied with Western artillery shells, but Russian forces continue to advance slowly.
“The enemy is not paying attention to the relatively high losses and continues to advance towards Pokrovsk,” Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a statement from the eastern front.
Pokrovsk is less than 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Russian-held territory, open-source maps of the battlefield show. The town sits at a road and rail intersection, making it a key logistical hub for the military and for civilians to the east.
“Active combat operations of varying intensity are taking place along the entire front,” Syrskyi said, noting that Russian forces were also attempting to capture floodplains near the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
FIGHTING RAGE IN THE EAST
Heavy fighting also took place near several eastern villages and towns, he said, including Krasnohorivka and Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town whose capture would bring Russia closer to threatening key Kiev-held towns in the Donetsk region.
Russia carried out 39 attacks on the Pokrovsk front in the past 24 hours, out of a total of 117 attacks along the front line, the military said in its daily battlefield report.
Russian troops captured two villages in the east over the weekend, Russian media reported, citing the Defense Ministry.
While Kiev's weary troops have remained in the background this year as Russia goes back on the offensive and keeps up the pressure, Moscow's progress has been slow.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who is on a diplomatic trip to China this week, estimated on Friday that Russia controls 17.68% of Ukraine's territory, compared to 17.61% on January 1, 2024.
A senior NATO official said this month that Russia does not have enough ammunition and troops for a large-scale offensive in Ukraine. To do so, it would need to secure significant quantities of munitions from other countries, in addition to the stockpiles it already has.
LONG-RANGE ATTACKS
Russia has carried out airstrikes on Ukraine's electricity grid in recent months, causing frequent power outages across the country.
Ukraine has used domestic drones to attack targets in Russia and carried out a major attack overnight that damaged the Tuapse oil refinery, the largest on the Black Sea.
In his statement, Syrskyi said it was crucial for Kiev to carry out long-range strikes on Russian forces, echoing statements by Ukrainian officials who have called on allies to allow Kiev to use Western-supplied weapons to strike military targets in Russia.
Russia has warned that the use of US and Western weapons against targets in Russia could lead to a new level of confrontation.
Ukraine also faces a shortage of short-range surface-to-air missiles to fend off Russian reconnaissance drones and relies on drones and other electronic warfare systems for defense, he said.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash; Editing by Tom Balmforth and Sharon Singleton)
