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In its intelligence report, the Defense Ministry said Russia’s offensive in Ukraine’s vast eastern territory saw only minimal gains as the defense forces maintained their lines.
Across a 300-mile eastern front, exchanges of fire, extensive bombardments, and incursions followed through retaliation continued. infantrymen killed daily.
Yesterday, Ukrainian forces attacked and severely broke a bridge for the origin of Russian troops in southern Ukraine, a regional official said.
Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Moscow-backed transit management for the Russian-controlled southern Kherson region, said the Ukrainian military hit the bridge over the Dnieper with missiles. He said the bridge had suffered serious damage but was not closed to traffic.
Stremousov said Ukrainian forces used U. S. -supplied HIMARS rocket launchers to hit the bridge, adding that some of them were intercepted through Russian air defenses. Today’s bombing of the Antonivskyi Bridge was the moment in many days.
It slightly broke Ukrainian shelling a day earlier, according to the Moscow-backed government in Kherson. At the start of the war, Russian troops temporarily seized the Kherson region, just north of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. They faced Ukrainian counterattacks, but largely stood firm.
The 1. 4-kilometer (0. 9-mile) bridge is the main bridge over the Dnieper and, if rendered unusable, it would be difficult for the Russian army to continue supplying its forces amid repeated Ukrainian attacks.
The Defense Ministry said the bridge could most likely still be used after the Ukrainian attacks, but that it is a “key vulnerability for Russian forces. “
“This is one of the two road crossing problems in the Dnieper through which Russia can send or withdraw its forces to the territory it occupied west of the river,” he added.
“Control of the Dnieper crossings is likely to be a key element in the final results of the fighting in the region. “
The Ukrainian attacks on the Kherson Bridge come as most Russian forces are caught up in fighting in Donbass, Ukraine’s commercial hub, where they have slowly progressed in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance.
Russia’s floor advance has slowed, partly because Ukraine is more effective than U. S. weapons and partly because of what Russian President Vladimir Putin has called an “operational pause. “
Russia is focusing more on long-range aerial bombardment missiles.
Ukrainian officials expressed hope that Kyiv can deplete the Russian army’s resources in the fight for Donbass and then launch a counteroffensive to retake the Kherson region and parts of the Zaporizhzhia region that the Russians took at the beginning of the war.
With indications that Ukraine is making counterattack plans to retake occupied areas, the Russian military has in recent weeks targeted the Black Sea port of Odessa and parts of southern Ukraine where its troops captured cities earlier in the war.
Kherson, the site of a major shipbuilding industry at the confluence of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea near Russia-annexed Crimea, is one of many spaces that a U. S. government spokesman has been able to afford. The U. S. said Russia seeks to annex.