Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has revealed that Russia has amassed around 170,000 troops in the eastern Donetsk region, aiming to seize the strategic stronghold. Pokrovsk is in a critical bid for victory on the battlefield,
Speaking on Friday, Mr Zelensky described the situation in Pokrovsk as “difficult”, while also denying recent Russian claims that the devastated city is under siege after more than a year of intense fighting.
He acknowledged that some Russian units had infiltrated, but also said that Ukrainian defenders were actively “taking them out”.
“There are Russians in Pokrovsk,” Zelensky said at a media briefing. Kyiv“They’re being destroyed, slowly destroyed, because, well, we need to preserve our personnel.”
In the nearly four years since the last siege since Russia launched an all-out invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine has retreated from some locations to avoid losing troops. Ukrainian forces are extremely weak against Russia’s larger army.
Russian President Vladimir Putin Recent claims have been made that Russian forces are making significant advances on the battlefield, although their progress in troops and armor has been slow and costly.
Putin is trying to persuade United States of AmericaWhat it wants is to seek a peace agreement that cannot pit Ukraine against Russian military superiority. He has also emphasized what he says is improving Russia’s nuclear capability as he refuses to back down from what he says are his country’s legitimate war goals.
Ukraine claims attack on Russian oil facilities
Ukraine is retaliating by attacking targets inside Russia to disrupt military logistics and make Russian citizens feel the effects of the war.
Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has launched more than 160 successful long-range attacks on Russia’s oil extraction and refining facilities, Vasyl Maliuk, head of Ukraine’s security service, told reporters at a briefing.
In September and October alone, Ukraine carried out 20 attacks on Russian oil facilities, Maliuk said.
He claimed that the attacks caused a 20 percent decline in oil products in Russia’s domestic market and temporarily halted the operation of 37 percent of Russia’s oil refining capacity. The claims could not be independently verified.
Maliuk said, “Clearly, we are not resting on our laurels. There are many new perspectives and new approaches to this work.” “These include new equipment, new combat units and new methods and means of communication.”
He said Ukraine this year has destroyed about half of Russia’s state-of-the-art Pantsir air defense systems, which have intercepted Ukrainian long-range drones.
He also said Ukrainian forces last year destroyed one of Russia’s advanced new hypersonic missiles, which can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, after it was shot down on the ground at a military base inside Russia.
The Oresnik missile, which Putin promoted late last year as a game-changing weapon impervious to air defense systems, was hit at the Kapustin Yar military firing range near the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to Maliuk.
A year after Putin said the missile was used in an attack on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Maliuk came months after saying Ukraine had destroyed one of them.
UN reports increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties
Meanwhile, Russian drones attacked apartment blocks in the northeastern city of Sumy overnight, wounding 11 people, including four children, and also attacked energy infrastructure in the southern Odessa region, officials said on Friday.
Matthias Schmale, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, said on Friday that this year’s war has been deadlier for civilians than that of 2024, with casualties increasing by 30 percent so far.
Russia’s almost daily airstrikes on Ukrainian energy production and distribution facilities are particularly worrying because the winter is forecast to be much colder than last year, Schmale said at a briefing in Geneva.
According to Shmale, public infrastructure to run water, sewage and heating systems in Ukrainian cities is centralized, and the UN fears that depriving people of those services in high-rise buildings in cities near the front lines “could turn into a major crisis”.
“Destroying energy generation and distribution capacity as winter begins clearly impacts civilian populations and is a form of terror,” he said.
Moreover, the U.N. humanitarian operation lacks the funds to respond to acute needs, as its Ukraine funding has gone from $4 billion in 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, to $1.1 billion this year, Schmale said.
He said the conflict “feels like a long war”, as US-led international peace efforts have failed this year.
“We’ve gone through a period this year where there was cautious optimism that this might be over,” Schmale said. “On the ground right now, it doesn’t look at all like it’s going to end any time soon.”