Ukrainian forces have retaken Urozhaine, a small village in the eastern Donetsk region, according to military officials in Kyiv.
The announcement comes more than two months into a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has so far failed to break through Russian defensive lines.
“Urozhaine liberated,” Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, said on Aug. 16 on the Telegram messaging platform. “Our defenders are entrenched on the [village’s] outskirts.”
Late last month, Kyiv declared that its forces had retaken the nearby village of Staromairoske, located to the immediate west of Urozhaine.
Both villages had fallen to Russian forces early last year, shortly after Moscow’s initial invasion of eastern Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry, however, has yet to confirm Urozhaine’s capture by Ukrainian forces. Yan Gagin, a spokesman for the Moscow-recognized Donetsk People’s Republic, says “fierce fighting” remains underway in and around the village.
Kyiv’s ongoing counteroffensive, which began in the first week of June, aims to retake territory captured by Russian forces.
Kyiv ultimately hopes to push its troops southward to the Sea of Azov, thereby severing Russia’s land bridge to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
Urozhaine and Staromairoske both sit about 55 miles north of the Sea of Azov.
‘Pocket of Destruction’
Except for a handful of villages, Kyiv’s vaunted counteroffensive has failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs, Western officials concede. They attribute the slow pace of advance to heavily fortified Russian lines of defense, which include trenches, minefields, and other barriers.Ms. Maliar asserted this week that Ukrainian forces face “the complete mining of the territory, cement fortifications of key heights, and constant mortar and artillery shelling.”
What’s more, she said, “The Russians are using aviation.”
According to Mr. Gagin, Ukraine has lost hundreds of troops in its repeated attempts to take—and retain—Urozhaine.
“Urozhaine has become a pocket of destruction, where our heavy armaments are grinding down the Ukrainian battlegroup,” he told Russia’s TASS news agency on Aug. 16.
“In slightly more than two days,” he added, “the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed has run into several hundred.”
On the same day, a Russian military spokesman told TASS that—during the previous 24 hours—Russian aircraft and artillery had inflicted considerable losses on Ukrainian troops and equipment in both Urozhaine and Staromairoske.
Shoigu: Kyiv ‘Almost Exhausted’
A day before Kyiv announced the capture of Urozhaine, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claimed that the Ukrainian military stands on the verge of exhaustion.“Preliminary results of combat operations show that Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted,” Mr. Shoigu asserted on Aug. 15.
He made the claim, without providing evidence, at a high-profile security forum in Moscow also attended by his Chinese counterpart.
Mr. Shoigu went on to assert that the months-long conflict had served to “debunk” the “myth” of Western military superiority.
“There is nothing on the battlefield ... that is unique or invulnerable to Russian weapons,” he said.
Since Russia launched its invasion early last year, the West—with the United States in the lead—has given Kyiv increasingly sophisticated arms and equipment. They have included HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced combat drones, Western-made battle tanks, and Patriot air-defense systems, along with other offensive equipment.
On the same day that Mr. Shoigu made the remarks, Stian Jenssen, a top aide to NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, floated the notion of making Ukraine a NATO member if it ceded lost territories to Russia.
“A solution [to the conflict] could be for Ukraine to give up territory and get NATO membership in return,” Mr. Jenssen was cited as saying by the Norwegian press.
In September 2022, Moscow effectively annexed Donetsk, along with Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia. It currently views all four regions as Russian Federation territory.
Officials in Kyiv responded angrily to Mr. Jenssen’s proposal.
“Trading territory for a NATO umbrella? It is ridiculous,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top Ukrainian presidential adviser, posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.
“That means deliberately choosing the defeat of democracy, encouraging a global criminal [a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin], preserving the Russian regime, destroying international law, and passing the war on to other generations.”
