(Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had reduced the ability of Russian troops to carry out attacks in the Donetsk region on the eastern front of the more than 2½-year war.
Zelenskyy said in his late-night video address, after consultations with commanders, that the army is doing its utmost “for the resilience of our combat brigades.”
“At the moment, the Ukrainian armed forces have managed to reduce the attack potential of the occupiers in the Donetsk region,” he said.
The situation, he said, remained “very difficult with daily heavy fighting” in the two sectors of the eastern front most heavily attacked by the Russians, near the towns of Pokrovsk and Kurakhove.
The Ukrainian operation in the Kursk region of southern Russia, which began last month, has seen the Russian military divert resources from the eastern front, Zelenskiy said.
And the capture of Russian troops bolstered Ukraine's POW “exchange fund,” which could serve as a bargaining chip for exchanges with Moscow.
“In this theater, we managed to divert almost 40,000 Russian troops,” he said. “Our active measures continue.”
The president also said one person had been killed in a Russian attack on a nursing home in Ukraine's northern Sumy region, an area that is regularly targeted by Russian attacks.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Bogdan Kochubey; Editing by Mark Porter and Alistair Bell)
