Ukraine Seeks to Punch 2nd Hole in Russian Lines in South (2024)

Ukraine’s forces are churning slowly forward after breaching Russia’s initial defensive lines.

But analysts said that does not necessarily mean they have secured the territory, in an offensive that has met fierce resistance and made progress in small steps and at a high cost in casualties and equipment.

For their part, Ukrainian military officials refrained from making any sweeping claims.

Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Army in the south, told national television that the Russian trenches and dugouts that Kyiv’s forces were now encountering near Verbove were “not as strong” as at the first line of defense. But he said Russian minefields would complicate Ukraine’s push forward, and military analysts have suggested that Moscow may have reinforced its defenses outside Robotyne with more troops.

Ukrainians forces enjoyed surprising successes earlier in the war by holding Kyiv, the capital, and repelling Russian forces at the end of March last year. Later, in September, they were able to drive Russian soldiers from vast swaths of land they had seized in the northeast of the country and then again in the south two months later.

But this counteroffensive, which began almost three months ago, has been another matter. With the attack long expected, Russian forces had plenty of time to dig in, building barriers and laying mines, and rendering vast parts of the landscape deadly with a single misstep.

The Ukrainian military aims to reclaim land in the south and east of the country. In the south, its goal is to reach the Sea of Azov and drive a wedge through Russian-occupied territory, and its main effort so far has been in the direction of the city of Melitopol.

The retaking of Robotyne last week marked a significant moment in Ukraine’s efforts to sever Moscow’s supply lines to occupied Crimea, but Kyiv’s forces still have a long way to go. Now, their push from Robotyne east to Verbove is aimed at widening the breach in Russia’s layers of defenses, two military analysts, Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, wrote in a paper published on Monday.

Expanding that breach, they said, is critical because “a narrow advance could leave its forces vulnerable to counterattacks on the flanks.” A wider gap would also allow Ukrainian forces to bring in more equipment and personnel to support their advance south.

A strategic target in this push appears to be the city of Tokmak, a road-and-rail hub about 15 miles south of Robotyne. To reach that city, Ukrainian forces would have to fully break through the defenses around Verbove and then breach additional layers.

That suggests a slow and exhausting fight that could take several more months, with the likelihood of heavy casualties on both sides.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said he had once again visited the front lines — the latest in a series of trips that appear aimed at bolstering the morale of troops waging a bloody and slow battle.

Mr. Zelensky said he had visited combat brigades fighting near the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces seized in the spring after a nearly yearlong battle. Ukrainian fighters have since managed to regain some land around it.

His office said the Ukrainian leader had discussed “the problematic issues and needs of the units,” among them the provision of artillery shells and air-defense missiles.

Late on Monday, in his nightly video address, Mr. Zelensky said, “It is extremely important to support our warriors, to communicate with the brigade and battalion commanders,” and reported that he had visited 11 brigades in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions that day.

The subject of ammunition also came up during his visits with troops in Donetsk on Monday, according to Mr. Zelensky’s office. It said that commanders had mentioned the growing need for drones and “anti-drone weapons, insufficient manning of units and a shortage of certain types of ammunition.”

A report on cluster munitions finds Russia’s use of them in Ukraine drove a global surge in their toll.

The figures underscore the “massive human impact” of cluster munitions use in Ukraine, the report said.

But the report reflects only one facet of the devastation and deaths in Ukraine, which have been caused mainly by Russia’s invading forces in shelling and launching drone and missile strikes. According to the most recent figures issued by the United Nations, as of July 31, there have been 26,015 civilian casualties in Ukraine since the war began in February 2022, with 9,369 people killed and 16,646 others injured.

More than 100 countries — notable exceptions include the United States, Russia and Ukraine — agreed to a 2008 treaty banning the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions because of the indiscriminate harm they cause to civilians. The weapons are designed to break open and scatter a cluster of smaller “bomblets” across a wide area. But many fail to detonate immediately, and can explode years later, often in the hands of curious and unsuspecting children.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, an international network of nongovernmental organizations, campaigns for all countries to adhere to the treaty.

Ukraine has also used cluster munitions, but the global surge in casualties from the weapons was driven far more by Russia’s repeated use of the weapons in Ukraine, the watchdog’s report found.

The United States agreed to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine this summer, a decision that President Biden said was “difficult” but ultimately had to be made because “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”

Sending the cluster munitions to Ukraine was a “devastating” choice that would only add to the toll of a war in which Russia used the weapons from the start, according to Mary Wareham, an advocacy director at Human Rights Watch who edited portions of the report.

“Two wrongs,” she said, “don’t make a right.”

Children made up the majority of casualties from cluster munition remnants in 2022, the report also found. Raising awareness of what they look like and the dangers they pose, already a challenging task, will be further complicated in Ukraine because Russia has used so many different kinds of the weapons, some of which were newly produced in 2022, said Loren Persi, a research team leader who helped to prepare the report.

A “whole variety of these intriguing-looking, often-mechanical toylike devices” will be left behind, and could cause severe fragmentation injuries in children who touch them, Mr. Persi said.

Several children are often killed or injured by cluster munition remnants at a time, he added, because they usually come across the weapons while playing outside together.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Black Sea oil and gas rigs become a target in the war.

There are about 10 platforms in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, according to Andriy Klymenko, the Kyiv-based editor in chief of the Black Sea News publication. Several are mobile barges fitted with drilling equipment and long support legs that are lowered to the seafloor.

The platforms are owned by Chernomorneftegaz, a Crimea-based oil and gas company that Russia seized when Moscow illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014. According to Mr. Klymenko, they have not been operational since June of last year, when Ukraine first attacked them.

No longer in use for drilling, the platforms have taken on strategic importance in the war “as forward deployment bases, helicopter landing sites, and to position long-range missile systems,” Britain’s defense ministry said in an intelligence update last week, noting the increased fighting around the rigs.

The platforms can also host surveillance and reconnaissance systems to gather intelligence on enemy movements, said Seth G. Jones, a military analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based research group.

“They’re important for using them as islands for offensive and defensive operations,” Mr. Jones said. “That makes them valuable for both sides of this fight.”

Ukraine’s military intelligence service said the recent clash took place near several rigs east of Snake island that are known as the Boyko Towers. The intelligence service released a short video that appears to show combat boats near what The New York Times verified is an oil rig in the Black Sea.

Iulia-Sabina Joja, the head of the Black Sea Program at the Middle East Institute research group, said Moscow has tried using the platforms to protect Crimea and detect incoming attacks, while Ukraine tries to weaken these defenses. Crimea is a prime target for Kyiv because it is home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet and to logistical hubs supporting Moscow’s occupation of parts of southern Ukraine.

“Ukraine has all the interest to destroy military capabilities in that area,” Ms. Joja said.

Clashes around the platforms appear to be continuing. Rybar, an influential Russian military blogger, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app that Russia had struck a high-speed Ukrainian military boat last Wednesday near the Odeske gas field, where the Boyko Towers are. The account has not been independently verified, and Ukraine has not commented on it.

Rybar said Russia should expect more Ukrainian attacks on the rigs because radar and communications equipment could be placed there.

Haley Willis contributed reporting.

Ukraine’s first lady speaks of the strains of being married to a wartime president.

For months after the war began, Ms. Zelenska stayed in hiding with her children. In the interview, she described her emotional state then as “a constant feeling of adrenaline.” But as time passed, she said, she found it necessary to calm herself and start living life in “the existing conditions.”

The first lady and Mr. Zelensky were high school sweethearts who went on to work together in a comedy troupe and television studio, he as a performer and she as a scriptwriter.

The war has thrust Mr. Zelensky into the most important role of his lifetime, and has done the same for his wife. After emerging from hiding last year, she began traveling the world to meet leaders and give speeches.

“We don’t live together with my husband, the family is separated,” she said. “We have the opportunity to see each other, but not as often as we would like. My son misses his father.”

The interview was broadcast on the eve of a conference Ms. Zelenska was scheduled to co-host in Kyiv on Wednesday that will focus on mental health and resilience. The other host is the British actor and writer Stephen Fry, a mental health activist.

“I really hope that I can inspire someone, can give someone hope or advice, or prove with my own example that we live, we work, we move forward,” Ms. Zelenska said.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

A planned meeting between Kim Jong-un and Putin suggests growing cooperation on weapons.

The United States first warned about cooperation between North Korea and Russia a year ago. Officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said that Russia planned to buy artillery shells for use in Ukraine. In subsequent disclosures, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said North Korea had shipped munitions to Russia through the Middle East and North Africa.

U.S. government officials said at the time that Russia’s decision to turn for weapons to North Korea, and earlier Iran, was a sign that sanctions and export controls imposed by the United States and Europe were hurting Moscow’s ability to obtain supplies for its army. U.S. officials said that disclosing the cooperation publicly had deterred North Korea and that few if any North Korean weapons had made it to the front lines in Ukraine.

Deterring support for Russia from North Korea, Iran and China is a critical element of the Biden administration’s strategy for helping Ukraine in its defense against Russia.

China, warned by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in February not to provide lethal aid, has supplied dual-use technology and components but has not sent drones or heavy weaponry to the Russian military, U.S. officials said.

Iran has supplied drones and is helping Russia build a drone factory. But U.S. officials believe their warnings have helped prod Iran to reconsider plans of providing ballistic missiles to Russia, at least so far.

Zelensky visits troops fighting on the front lines around Bakhmut.

On Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky said that he had visited combat brigades fighting near the ruined city of Bakhmut in Donetsk. Russian forces seized Bakhmut in the spring after a nearly yearlong battle, but Ukrainian forces have since managed to regain some land around it.

The Ukrainian leader discussed “the problematic issues and needs of the units” in detail, including “the provision of artillery shells” and air-defense missiles, his office said in a statement.

The subject of ammunition also came up during his visits with troops in Donetsk on Monday, according to Mr. Zelensky’s office. It said that commanders had mentioned the growing need for drones and “anti-drone weapons, insufficient manning of units and a shortage of certain types of ammunition.”

The United States and its allies have sent millions of rounds of ammunition to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February last year. But Ukraine has long been in danger of running out of ammunition in the war, as each side continually pounds the other with mortars, rockets and other artillery.

Recent estimates suggest that Ukraine was burning through as much as 8,000 rounds of ammunition each day in the counteroffensive that began in early June. In addition to deliveries from Western allies Ukraine has moved to increase its own production of ammunition as the fight rages on.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Cuba says it uncovered a Russian human trafficking ring for the war in Ukraine.

The statement did not say who was behind the trafficking network, or how many people had been affected. The claims had not been independently verified, and the Russian authorities did not immediately comment.

The Moscow Times reported that a social media account under the name of Elena Shuvalova had for months been posting ads in a Facebook group called “Cubans in Moscow” offering a one-year contract with the Russian Army. On Tuesday, the group had nearly 76,000 members. The statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry did not mention the group.

But Andrés Albuquerque, a Cuban political analyst in Miami, said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would not recruit in Cuba without the consent of the country’s government, and that it was “not possible” for the government not to know about the human trafficking network.

“In Cuba that does not exist,” Mr. Albuquerque said.

Cuba has been a close ally of Russia since the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, met with Mr. Putin during his official visit to Russia last November, and they have pledged to strengthen what they have called a “strategic partnership.” And when Álvaro López Miera, the head of Cuba’s Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, visited Moscow in June, he was received by his Russian counterpart, Sergei K. Shoigu, who said that Cuba was Russia’s “most important ally” in the Caribbean.

“Our Cuban friends confirmed their attitude toward our country, including demonstrating a full understanding of the reasons for the start of a special military operation in Ukraine,” Mr. Shoigu said at the time, according to reports from Tass, a Russian state media agency. There are direct flights between the countries, which have a mutual visa-free arrangement for 90 days out of 180. About 70,000 Russian tourists visited Cuba in the first half of 2023, according to Russian state media, and about 11,000 Cubans visited Russia in 2022, according to the Russian Association of Tour Operators.

It is not the first time that a country has claimed that its citizens were being recruited to fight for Russia in Ukraine. In late June, a prosecutor’s office in the Kostanay region of north Kazakhstan issued a statement saying that advertisem*nts attempting to recruit people to “participate in the armed conflict in Ukraine” had been appearing on social media and elsewhere online.

The statement said that mercenary activities were prohibited by the Kazakh Constitution, and that serving in military operations in a foreign country was a criminal offense.

Mr. Shoigu announced late last year that the ranks of the Russian Army needed to be expanded from 1.15 million servicemen to 1.5 million, and U.S. officials have said that Russia has struggled to attract recruits.

The Russian government has taken a number of measures to bolster its military ranks, including making draft evasion more difficult and raising the maximum age of men required to complete military service from 27 to 30.

Camila Acosta contributed reporting from Havana, and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City.

Russia arrests a mathematician minutes after his release from a penal colony, local media say.

Mediazona, an independent news outlet, reported that the new case against Mr. Miftakhov involved allegations that he expressed support for a teenager who blew himself up in an office belonging to Russia’s security services in 2018.

Mr. Miftakhov was a graduate student at Moscow State University when he was first arrested in 2019. While the authorities initially accused him of making an explosive device, they ultimately shifted to the charge of hooliganism on the United Russia office in Moscow.

State media reports from the time said that an office window had been broken and a smoke bomb thrown into an empty room.

Mr. Miftakhov told his lawyer that he was beaten and threatened by the police while in custody, according to state media reports. He maintained his innocence throughout the trial. In 2021, a Moscow court sentenced him to six years in a penal colony. His release on Monday was related to time served in pre-trial detention, according to Russian media.