Russian Strikes Kill Six in Ukraine as Moscow Looks to Undermine Kyiv’s Counteroffensive

A spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s Southern Command said the attacks sought to disrupt Ukraine’s counteroffensive. “We can see that the enemy’s long-range attacks are aimed at the rear regions, which, according to the enemy, should be a supply area for the front line,” Natalia Humeniuk told a local news broadcast.

Ukrainian forces have made small inroads in the early days of their move to oust Russian forces from the 20% of Ukraine they now occupy, but the scale of the challenges they face is already clear. While Kyiv’s Western allies armed and trained Ukrainian troops in recent months, Russian forces were fortifying defenses in the south and east of the country. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the counteroffensive would take time and cost many soldiers’ lives.

In his nightly address, Zelensky highlighted gains around the eastern city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces recently seized after months of grueling combat. “Here, in different areas of the front there are advancements,” Zelensky said.

Ukrainian forces began launching counterattacks against Russian positions around Bakhmut as they lost control of the city itself last month. Elsewhere along the front line, Ukrainian forces haven’t so far reached the main line of Russia’s defenses in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia and eastern Donetsk regions, where they are probing for weak spots.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said Moscow had been able to fight off Ukraine’s counteroffensive so far but acknowledged losing a significant number of tanks and lacking key equipment such as drones.

Ukraine has also lost some of the equipment it received from Western allies, including several Leopard tanks and U.S.-made Bradley Fighting Vehicles, according to Oryx, an independent team of analysts tracking both sides’ losses in the war, and videos published on Russian social-media accounts. 

Some of the initial assaults last week appeared to lack air-defense support, which left tanks and other vehicles vulnerable to attacks from Russian drones and helicopter gunships. In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, flat, open fields offer almost no cover for an attacking force.

The U.K.’s Ministry of Defense said there had been an uptick in Russian tactical combat air sorties in recent weeks, especially over the south of Ukraine, in response to Kyiv’s offensive operations. Despite that, the number of daily sorties remains much lower than the peak of up to 300 daily missions early in the war, the ministry added in its daily intelligence briefing.

Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, said he highlighted the need to strengthen air defense, artillery and counterbattery capabilities in a call with the U.S.’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. “Heavy defensive and offensive battles are ongoing in the east and south of the country,” Zaluzhniy said, according to a readout of the call from his office on Tuesday. “We have certain successes; we are implementing our plans; we are moving forward.”

During the overnight attack, Russia fired four cruise missiles from the Black Sea toward the coastal Odesa region, Ukraine’s air force said. Ukraine shot three of them down, but one struck a warehouse, killing three employees.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration in Ukraine’s east, said three people had been killed in strikes on Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka. 

All but one of the 10 Iranian-made attack drones Russia launched from the eastern coast of the Azov Sea were shot down, Ukraine’s air force said, but an infrastructure facility in the central Kirovohrad region was hit. 

Meanwhile, the death toll from a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Zelensky’s hometown of Kryviy Rih on Tuesday rose to 12, said the head of the city council.

Separately, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko

While analysts believe that Belarus won’t have access to the weapons directly, Lukashenko said there would be no problem in coordinating a strike with Putin if necessary. Belarus has Russian missiles on its territory, but it couldn’t be determined whether Russia had moved any tactical nuclear warheads to its ally.

Write to Isabel Coles at [email protected] and Thomas Grove at [email protected]