kyiv, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian troops are engaged in intense fighting with the advancing Russian army in two border areas, the president said. Volodymyr Zelensky said, as the death toll from the collapse of a Russian building blamed on Ukrainian bombing rose to 15.
Zelenskyy said “fierce fighting” was taking place near the border in eastern and northeastern Ukraine as outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers tried to repel a major Russian ground offensive .
“The defensive battles are ongoing, fierce fighting across much of our border area,” Zelenskyy said in his late-night video address on Sunday.
Kremlin forces seek to exploit Ukrainian weaknesses before significant new military aid for kyiv from the United States and its European partners arrives on the battlefield in the coming weeks and months, say analysts. This makes this period a window of opportunity for Moscow and one of the most dangerous for kyiv in the two-year war, they say.
The new Russian push into the northeastern Kharkiv region, as well as the ongoing advance in the eastern Donetsk region, comes after months when the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line barely moved. Meanwhile, both sides have resorted to long-range strikes in what has largely become a war of attrition.
The Kharkiv incursion may be an attempt to create a “buffer zone” to protect Belgorod, an adjacent Russian border region hit by Ukrainian attacks.
Russian emergency services on Monday finished clearing rubble from Belgorod, the region’s capital, where part of a residential building collapsed following what authorities described as Ukrainian bombing.
Fifteen bodies were pulled from the rubble, Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said, and another 27 people were injured.
Three other people in the town of Belgorod were killed by shelling on Sunday evening, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced Sergei Shoigu as defense minister in a cabinet reshuffle on Sunday. Shoigu was widely seen as a key figure in Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to Ukraine in February 2022. Russia expected the operation to quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian military and that Ukrainians would largely welcome the troops Russians.
Zelenskyy said the fighting in the Donetsk region is “no less intense” than in Kharkiv. He said the Kremlin aimed to “disperse our forces” by opening a second active front in Kharkiv.
He described the area around the Pokrovsk region, just inside the Ukrainian border in Donetsk, as “the most difficult”.
Before the war, Pokrovsk was a town of around 60,000 people and until recently was a two-hour drive from the front line. Today, it’s less than half.
The capture of the Donetsk town of Avdiivka in February opened the door for Kremlin troops to push west, deeper into Donetsk. Russia illegally annexed Donetsk and three other regions in 2022, shortly after invading Ukraine, and taking control of all of Donetsk is one of the Kremlin’s main war goals.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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