Russia seizes key village in Ukraine, kyiv was taken in counteroffensive, Moscow says

Russian troops have captured the village of Urozhaine, the Kremlin said Sunday, about 11 months after kyiv recaptured the settlement from Moscow in its summer 2023 offensive.

Russian troops have taken control of Urozhaine and are “cleaning and demining” it, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

Urozhaine is located in the south of the eastern Donetsk region, near the border with Zaporizhia. It has long been the scene of violent clashes, as has the neighbouring village of Staromaiorske.

Ukraine recaptured Urozhaine and Staromaiorske in the summer of 2023, part of a slow and inconclusive counteroffensive that yielded only small gains for Kiev. Ukraine says the effort started later than planned and arms deliveries to its troops were delayed, meaning Russia had time to prepare its defenses and heavily mine its territory.

Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn, spokesman for the Ukrainian Khortytsia group of forces operating in the east of the country, said: Newsweek On Sunday, the Kiev military refrained from any official comment on the situation around Urozhaine, as “real battles” were raging.

“The situation is difficult,” Volochyn said, adding that Russian attacks in the region had intensified in recent days.

Newsweek The Ukrainian military said at 8 a.m. local time on Sunday morning that Russia had carried out 18 attacks over the past day on the section of the frontline that includes Urozhaine, but did not specify whether its troops had withdrawn from the town.

Deep State, a popular Ukrainian war blog, said Saturday that Russian forces launched a “massive assault on the northern part of the village” early in the day local time. “The enemy forces were significant,” the blog wrote.

In a later article, Deep State said Russian forces had taken control of Urozhaine. The US think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said on Saturday that geotagged imagery taken earlier in the weekend indicated Russian troops had advanced into the northern part of the settlement.

The official Tass news agency reported on Friday that Ukrainian troops had withdrawn from their positions in the centre of the village.

Russia has made gradual gains along hundreds of kilometers of front lines, maintaining pressure on Ukraine’s eastern front lines while attacking in the country’s northeast.

In early May, Russia launched a cross-border offensive in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, claiming a handful of border towns and moving north to the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv. But kyiv quickly warned that Moscow was hoping to exploit Ukraine’s resources in the east, and has regularly reported intensifying attacks in Donetsk.

Western analysts suggest that Ukrainian forces have managed to push back Russian control around a settlement north of the city of Kharkiv and advance around the town of Kupiansk and northwest to Svatove, a Russian-controlled town in Luhansk.

Russian forces have advanced near the city of Toretsk in Donetsk and northwest of Avdiivka, the ISW think tank reported Saturday. Moscow seized Avdiivka in February and has been advancing westward and gaining ground in the months since.