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Zelenskyy: Army Locked in Fierce Battle05/13 06:18
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukrainian troops are locked in intense battles with
the advancing Russian army in two border areas, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
said, while the death toll from a Russian apartment building collapse blamed on
Ukrainian shelling rose to 15.
Zelenskyy said "fierce battles" are taking place near the border in eastern
and northeastern Ukraine as outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers try to
hold back a significant Russian ground offensive.
"Defensive battles are ongoing, fierce battles, on a large part of our
border area," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Sunday.
Ukraine's general staff said late Sunday that Russian forces had conducted
at least 22 attacks over the previous 24 hours in two parts of the Kharkiv
region and had "tactical success." The statement did not elaborate.
The Kremlin's forces are aiming to exploit Ukrainian weaknesses before a big
batch of new military aid for Kyiv from the U.S. and European partners arrives
on the battlefield in the coming weeks and months, analysts say. That 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 in the northeastern Kharkiv region, along with the
ongoing drive into the eastern Donetsk region, come after months when the about
1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line barely budged. In the meantime, both
sides have used long-range strikes in what largely became a war of attrition.
The Kharkiv incursion may be an attempt to create a "buffer zone" to protect
Belgorod, an adjacent Russian border region battered by frequent Ukrainian
attacks -- to the Kremlin's embarrassment. In March, Russia announced plans to
evacuate about 9,000 children from the Belgorod region because it was being
shelled continuously .
Russian emergency services on Monday finished clearing the rubble in the
region's capital city of Belgorod, where a section of a residential building
collapsed following what authorities said was Ukrainian shelling.
Fifteen bodies were pulled from the rubble, Belgorod regional Gov.
Vyacheslav Gladkov said, and 27 other people were wounded.
Another three people in the city of Belgorod were killed by shelling late
Sunday, he said.
Yevgeny Poddubny, a usually well-connected military correspondent for
Russia's state TV corporation VGTRK, said in a recent Telegram post that the
Kharkiv assault marked the beginning of "a new phase."
"We're pushing the enemy back from the border, destroying the enemy in order
to deprive the Kyiv regime of the opportunity to use relatively cheap rockets
to attack Belgorod," he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday replaced Sergei Shoigu as defense
minister in a Cabinet shakeup. Shoigu was widely seen as a key figure in
Putin's decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Russia
had expected the operation to quickly overwhelm Ukraine's army and for
Ukrainians to broadly welcome Russian troops.
Zelenskyy said fighting in the Donetsk area is "no less intense" than in
Kharkiv. He said the Kremlin aimed to "spread our forces thin" by opening a
second active front in Kharkiv.
He described the area around Pokrovsk region, just inside the Ukrainian
border in Donetsk, as "the most difficult."
Pokrovsk was a town of around 60,000 people before the war and was until
recently a two-hour drive from the front line. Now it is less than half that.
The capture of the Donetsk city of Avdiivka in February opened a door for
the Kremlin's troops to push westward, deeper into Donetsk. Russia illegally
annexed Donetsk and three other regions in 2022 shortly after it invaded
Ukraine, and taking control of all of Donetsk is one of the Kremlin's main war
goals.
Though Ukraine apparently was braced for the Russian onslaught in the
Kharkiv region, in some areas it only belatedly began preparing fortifications,
an issue that has been a source of criticism by Ukrainian troops of their
commanders.
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