World News: Ukraine wages counteroffensive in east – Gulf Digital News

World News: Ukraine wages counteroffensive in east – Gulf Digital News

KYIV: Ukrainian forces have launched a counteroffensive near the Russian-held town of Izium in eastern Ukraine, a regional governor said yesterday, in what could prove a serious setback for Moscow’s plans to capture the entire Donbas region.

Russian forces have focused much of their firepower on the Donbas in a “second phase” of their invasion announced on April 19, after they failed to reach the capital Kyiv from the north in the early weeks of the war.

But Ukraine has been retaking territory in its northeast, driving the Russians away from the second-largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Keeping up pressure on Izium and Russian supply lines will make it harder for Moscow to encircle battle-hardened Ukrainian troops on the eastern front in the Donbas.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also said complex talks were underway to find a way to evacuate a large number of wounded soldiers from a besieged steel works in the port of Mariupol in return for the release of Russian prisoners of war.

Mariupol, which has seen the heaviest fighting in nearly three months of war, is now in Russian hands but hundreds of Ukrainian defenders are still holding out at the Azovstal steelworks despite weeks of heavy Russian bombardment.

Western military