“They pressed relentlessly” to capture Vovche and Prohres, Oleh Chaus, a sergeant major in Ukraine’s 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, told Svaboda radio.
“They sent in a large number of troops, which had not been used before,” he said. The Russian Defense Ministry said in recent days that it had taken control of the villages, but the Ukrainian General Staff has not made any official comment.
The villages are about 30 kilometers northwest of Avdiivka, a Donetsk city that the Russian army captured in February after a long battle. That victory was the Kremlin’s latest major triumph in the war that is now in its third year.
Russia’s attack, fueled by its vast advantage in troops and weapons, has repeatedly forced Ukrainians to retreat from defensive positions to avoid capture or death. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, deputy battalion commander of the 47th brigade, confirmed to local media that the villages had been taken. The military official blamed the defeat on the troops’ lack of training, the officers’ weak skills, low motivation and inadequate weapons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday described the situation in the Donetsk region as “extremely difficult.”
Russia’s strategy of attritional warfare, using powerful glide bombs to crush Ukrainian defenses before infantry advances, has yielded incremental gains for the Kremlin, which is seeking another major victory. Russian troops are also stepping up their weeks-long effort to break through Ukrainian defenses around Pokrovsk, a pre-war city of about 60,000 people, the Ukrainian General Staff said today. Russia has launched 52 strikes in the past 24 hours, nearly double the daily number recorded in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Russian air defenses thwarted a nighttime barrage of 39 Ukrainian drones in five regions of the country, Russian authorities said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the drones were “intercepted and destroyed” in regions bordering Ukraine, as well as in the Leningrad region, about 700 kilometers (440 miles) north of the Ukrainian border. A power plant, a bridge and a power line were damaged by drone debris. Ukraine has been using high-tech technology in its increasingly ambitious campaign of drone strikes deep inside Russia, targeting critical infrastructure, in an attempt to make the war more costly for Moscow and cripple its war machine.
