The Ukrainian army has broken through the first Russian defense lines on the southern front, the general responsible for the difficult counteroffensive led by Kiev assured in an interview with the American broadcaster CNN broadcast on Saturday. Supported by Western arms supplies, Ukraine launched a large-scale counteroffensive in the south and east in early June to push Russian forces back from the areas they occupied. This operation has long run up against the powerful Moscow-fortified lines, which consist of huge minefields, trenches and tank traps.
While this counteroffensive has so far only allowed the recapture of a handful of destroyed villages, Ukrainian forces managed to reach the first Russian lines in the south of Zaporizhzhia with the capture of the town of Robotyné in the region in early September. The fighting is now taking place east of this village, near Verbové.
“On the left, we have made a breakthrough and are continuing to move forward,” Ukrainian General Oleksandr Tarnavsky assured CNN, but acknowledged that progress was slower than hoped. The operation was happening “not as quickly as we thought, not like in the films about World War II,” he said.
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