Putin says Ukrainian attacks intensify as Kyiv touts steady gains

(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Ukraine had intensified its frontline attacks over the last few days while a Ukrainian official said Kyiv was making slow but steady progress in liberating its territory.

On Wednesday, three different media outlets cited unnamed U.S. officials as saying Kyiv had launched a new phase of its ambitious counteroffensive which seeks to eject Russian troops from the nearly 20% of Ukrainian land still under occupation.

Asked about these reports, Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, told Reuters that “there is nothing new” happening at front lines. “In the south, we are moving forward slowly but surely,” he said.

Meanwhile, Putin told Russian television that every Ukrainian assault had been beaten back, and that Moscow’s forces had inflicted significant losses on their opponents.

Russia’s defence ministry said Russian forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks around the village of Klishchiivka near Bakhmut, and north of Robotyne on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has thus far moved slowly, only recapturing several hundred square kilometers, a tiny fraction of the territory still under Russian control.

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed “very good results” on the battlefield in an address on Tuesday evening, promising to give details later.

One of the few areas where Kyiv has enjoyed success so far has been along the Mokri Yaly river in southeastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian troops have captured several settlements and are now nearing the Russian-held village of Staromaiorske.

Aleksandr Khodakovsky, an influential Moscow-backed separatist commander in eastern Ukraine, posted an angry message on his Telegram channel on Wednesday complaining about heavy shelling of Staromaiorske over several days followed by a Ukrainian assault which had made some gains.

Sak said there was fighting ongoing near Staromaiorske but the village was “not yet” under Ukrainian control.

(Reporting by Max Hunder and Felix Light; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Mark Heinrich)