Top Russian officer reports advances on all Ukrainian fronts

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(Reuters) -A senior Russian officer toured positions held by his troops in Ukraine on Wednesday and said Moscow’s forces were advancing on all fronts, the Russian Defence Ministry said, with the heaviest fighting taking place around the logistics centre of Pokrovsk.

General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of staff of the armed forces in what Moscow calls its “special military operation”, said Moscow’s troops were making progress in the eastern Donetsk region, the conflict’s focal point, and further west in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

“Our troops in the zone of the special military operation are advancing in practically all directions,” the Defence Ministry quoted Gerasimov as saying.

“And the heaviest fighting is occurring in the Krasnoarmeisk direction,” he added, using the Soviet-era name for the city of Pokrovsk, “where the enemy, by any means and taking no account of losses, is trying unsuccessfully to stop our advances and seize back the initiative.”

The Ukrainian military, he was quoted as saying, “has deployed the best-trained and most capable fighting units, taking them from other areas. And that facilitates the advance of our troops in other sectors.”

In their slow advance through eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have maintained heavy attacks on the area around Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region for months.

Gerasimov said Russian forces were also making progress in taking Kupiansk, a largely destroyed city in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, and Yampil, further east.

Gerasimov’s statements appeared to be at odds with accounts by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukrainian military officials, however.

Zelenskiy, interviewed by Sky News this week, said he expected new Russian offensives but added that Moscow’s forces had enjoyed little frontline success in their recent activity.

“On the whole, I am truly pleased that the last three Russian offensive drives have failed, though they are planning two more serious offensives,” he said. “In my view, this is an important signal.”

A Ukrainian commander this week said his forces had fended off a Russian advance near Pokrovsk, while the popular Ukrainian military blog DeepState, which uses open-source maps to track troop movements, reported Ukrainian successes in a nearby town.

A spokesperson for a Ukrainian unit near Kupiansk said on Wednesday that an attempted Russian advance on the town had resulted in many of its men being taken prisoner.

(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)