Ukrainian forces have retaken the tiny village of Urozhaine, moving farther into the Mokri Yaly River Valley in the south of the country, after more than a week of battling Russian troops, as Kyiv pushed on with a grinding counteroffensive that has struggled to break through entrenched Russian lines.
“Urozhaine has been liberated,” Hanna Malyar, a Ukrainian deputy defense minister, said in a statement on Wednesday, one day after Russian forces said they had retreated from the village.
The Russian Vostok battalion, which took part in the battle, confirmed in a statement on Tuesday, “We lost Urozhaine.”
It is the first village known to have been recaptured by Kyiv’s forces since they reclaimed Staromaiorske in July. As with other territory Ukraine has recaptured, it is retaking control of a village decimated by war: Urozhaine had a population of fewer than 1,000 people before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Retaking the village, which is in the Donetsk region, means Ukraine now holds positions on both banks of the river, opening up more options as its forces try to advance on Russian strongholds farther south. Kyiv’s goal is to reach the Sea of Azov and drive a wedge into the so-called land bridge between mainland Russia and occupied Crimea, a link that is vital to Moscow’s supply routes to the west.
If Ukrainian forces can move deep enough into Russian-controlled territory to put supply lines at risk of direct artillery fire, they hope to make Russia’s defensive positions untenable.
The fact that progress in Kyiv’s slow-going counteroffensive is now measured by the recapture of small villages reinforces how difficult the fighting has become.
Col. Petro Chernyk said at a news briefing held by the Ukrainian military on Tuesday that the Russians had set up formidable defenses across southern Ukraine, with the first line covered by minefields stretching for miles, a second line filled with artillery and troops, and a third line bolstered by rear positions meant to preserve resources.
But Kyiv’s forces have dug in for a long and brutal fight. After penetrating Russia’s defenses and claiming Urozhaine, the Ukrainians were driving east, toward the village of Oktyabrskoye, Russia’s Vostok battalion said. “About seven units of armored vehicles, accompanied by infantry, are trying to find a new promising direction,” the battalion said.
The claim could not be independently verified, and Ukraine’s military has maintained silence about its movements.
In a small corner of the northeast, however, Ukrainian forces were on the defensive. The commander of Kyiv’s ground forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, acknowledged in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday that defending against Russia’s growing offensive around the city of Kupiansk was difficult.
Moscow’s troops have been trying to break through Ukrainian defenses every day, he said, with the aim of capturing the city. But Ukrainian troops are holding the line so far, General Syrsky said.
Even as Ukraine’s forces face challenges on land, they are confronting waves of attacks on ports after the collapse of a deal that had allowed Kyiv to ship grain via the Black Sea despite a de facto Russian blockade. Moscow also threatened to treat any vessels attempting to reach Ukraine as hostile.
This weekend, Russian forces fired warning shots and boarded the cargo ship Sukru Okan in the Black Sea to inspect it to see if it was carrying prohibited goods. And early Wednesday, Russian forces attacked ports on the Danube River with drones.
Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said Russian drones had struck and damaged two hangar-type warehouses in the port of Reni in the Odesa region. A series of attacks along the Danube in recent weeks have caused alarm, in part because of the proximity of some of the ports to Romania.
The United States condemned the repeated attacks. “It is unacceptable,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesmen, said at a news briefing in Washington on Wednesday. “Putin simply does not care about global food security.”
A civilian cargo ship that had been stranded in Odesa since the start of the war ventured out of the port and into the turbulent waters of the Black Sea on Wednesday, the first since Moscow’s threats. The nearly 1,000-foot container ship, Joseph Schulte, which flies under the Hong Kong flag and is partly owned by a Chinese bank, set a course to Istanbul using a corridor that had been established by Ukraine for civilian vessels.
In establishing the corridor, the Ukrainian Navy said, it could assure ships’ safe passage through a maze of maritime mines they had installed to protect the Ukrainian coast.Once they left Ukrainian waters, ships could chart a course for Turkey within the national waters of Romania and Bulgaria, which are NATO members and are under the alliance’s protection.
“The fact that the first ship left the port is a little victory for Ukraine,” said Andriy Klymenko, the director of the Institute for Strategic Black Sea Studies, a Ukrainian research organization. “Let the first one be a lucky one.”
Kyiv’s efforts to restore seaport traffic despite the blockade raise the stakes for Ukraine’s allies, since an attack could draw other nations whose ships traverse the waters into the conflict.
Establishing a safe path for the small number of internationally flagged ships stranded in Ukrainian ports for 18 months would be a milestone. But Ukraine would face formidable obstacles if it sought to revive Odesa as a steady export route across the Black Sea, not least among them Russia’s frequent bombardment of the city’s port, experts said on Wednesday.
Andrey Sizov, the head of SovEcon, a Black Sea grain markets consultancy, called the Joseph Schulte’s departure a “very small first step,” saying that unless the Kremlin guaranteed safe passage, it was highly unlikely that Odesa could be made viable as a wartime export route.
“You would have to have a good reason to take a ship into a port that is being bombed,” said Mike Lee, a specialist in Black Sea agricultural projects at Green Square Agro Consulting in Britain.
Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a company with headquarters in Germany that owns the Joseph Schulte in partnership with the Chinese bank, said in a statement that the vessel had departed Ukraine with 2,000 containers of goods. It was not clear what the ship was carrying, but it was not designed to carry grain.
By early afternoon, the ship — which was being tracked by maritime monitoring services — was moving toward Romanian coastal waters.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London.
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