Zelenskiy says Ukraine inflicts frontline losses on Russian troops in Donetsk region

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(Reuters) -President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces were inflicting heavy losses in a counteroffensive in eastern Donetsk region, the main theatre of the more than 3-1/2 years of war in Ukraine.

Zelenskiy’s account, based on a report by Ukraine’s top commander, contrasted with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin’s address to senior Russian officers a day earlier in which he said Moscow’s forces held the strategic initiative in all frontline sectors.

Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said he spoke for almost an hour to top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi, with “particular attention on the Dobropillia operation, our counteroffensive”. He described heavy casualties in the area.

Ukraine has pointed to successes in Dobropillia, just north of the logistics hub of Pokrovsk, one of the key targets in Russia’s slow advance westward through Donetsk region.

Ukrainian forces, Zelenskiy said, were “defending ourselves along all other directions,” referring specifically to Kupiansk, a largely destroyed town in northeastern Ukraine under heavy Russian assaults for months.

He also described conditions as “difficult” around Novopavlivka, farther south in Zaporizhzhia region, but said “our active defensive actions there are showing good results”.

Reuters could not independently verify battlefield accounts from either side.

Putin told senior officers on Tuesday in northwestern Russia, near the country’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg, that Russia had recaptured almost 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) of land in Ukraine in 2025. 

He said Ukrainian forces were retreating in all sectors of the front and that while Kyiv was trying to strike deep into Russian territory, it would not help.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday that it had taken control of the village of Novohryhorivka in southern Zaporizhzhia region, the latest in a series of nearly daily announcements of newly captured settlements.

The regional governor in Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson said Russian attacks on Wednesday had killed three people in and around the city of the same name.

And the governor of Sumy region, on the northern border with Russia, said three people died in Russian drone attacks in different districts. 

(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Matthew Lewis)