Ukraine troops move to take back more of their territory from Russia….
That land was annexed a day ago…..
They don’t even know that the status of those area’s they admit…
The land retaken is beaten up….
The Russian’s first and Ukraine armies in retaking HAVE destroyed things…
There are some worries for the Ukraine military….
They may need some rest and resupply….
Biden has spoken to Zelensky today….
There have been prisoner exchanges…..
More on Russian troops status....
In Lyman, a strategically important regional hub reclaimed by the Ukrainian army on Saturday a day after Russia declared the region had been annexed, wind whistled over city blocks where every home is obliterated to heaps of brick.
In nearby Sviatohirsk, a once bustling town catering to tourists and pilgrims visiting a revered Orthodox monastery, the Roche Royal hotel was eerily empty, nearly every window blown out, its rooms and corridors littered with discarded wrappers for Russian rations and broken glass.
“We are liberating land but without people on it,” Vitaly Zagoruyko, a private in the Ukrainian army, said in an interview as he guarded a dock for a motorboat soldiers used to cross the Siversky Donetsk River, beside a blown-up bridge.
Looking around at the destroyed town, he spoke of the few residents who remained. “They come to us and say ‘we are brother peoples.’ And I say ‘we’re aren’t brothers now.’ Brothers don’t kill brothers.”
In two counteroffensives in the south and northeast, Ukraine’s military is taking back land at a fast clip. On Tuesday, officials said they had broken past Russian defenses in the southern Kherson region. The advances are both cheering Ukrainians and opening panoramas of some of the worst destruction seen in the war, after towns and villages were fought over twice, in the Russian invasion and Ukrainian counterattack.
In the eastern Donbas region, as much as 80 percent of the population fled west ahead of the Russian invasion last winter, becoming internally displaced people in western Ukraine or refugees in Europe.
As Ukraine counterattacked last month, some of those who remained fled the fighting to the east, into Russia. Some “ran the other way, toward the enemy,” Private Zagoruyko said of former inhabitants of the ruined ghost town he now patrols. He said he understood, as “they didn’t have any options.”
Still, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is seeking to limit the flight of Ukrainian citizens into Russia during the counteroffensive….
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Ukrainian soldiers have encountered hungry, poorly outfitted Russian troops, some with little weaponry to defend themselves…
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But the question remains how long Ukrainian momentum can last. In recent days, some Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv Province have spoken of exhaustion after weeks of nonstop fighting….
At the same time, Russia continues its drumbeat to finalize the so-called annexation treaties. Russia’s upper house of parliament voted to approve them on Tuesday, and Putin is expected to sign them into law soon. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
- Russian forces “are in a defensive crouch” after Ukrainian victories near Kherson, a senior U.S. military official told reporters Monday. Kherson sits by the Dnieper River and serves as a gateway to Ukraine’s western Black Sea ports and Russian-held Crimea to its south.
- Russia’s upper house, the Federation Council, ratified the illegal annexations of the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine’s east and south Tuesday. The lower house, the State Duma, approved the so-called annexations Monday. The rubber stamp signals that Moscow sees the territorial seizures as irreversible.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed “new liberated settlements in several regions,” saying recent wins reflect a “growing understanding that Russia made a mistake by starting a war against Ukraine.”
- A Russian court set Oct. 25 as the appeal date for Brittney Griner, the WNBA star held in Russia for drug possession, the Associated Press reported. In August, Griner was sentenced to 9½ years in prison after being accused of having vape canisters containing cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner’s attorneys say the penalty is excessive and that Griner was prescribed cannabis to treat pain.
Battleground updates
- Zelensky promised fair treatment for Ukrainians who remain in Russian-occupied territory. “If a person did not serve the occupiers and did not betray Ukraine, then there is no reason to consider such a person a collaborator,” he said in his Monday night address, adding that many people were simply trying to survive. Those who “betrayed Ukraine” would be assessed by the country’s security services, he said.
- Russian forces are continuing offensive operations in Ukraine’s north and east, the senior U.S. military official said. Russian troops are firing artillery shells into Kupiansk, a Ukrainian-held town near Luhansk. There is heavy fighting near Bakhmut as Russian forces try to push west, the official said, but Ukrainian troops are holding their lines…