In Ukraine’s South, Counterattacks Offer Kyiv Hope for Turning Back Russia; Ukraine will fight on from higher ground after pullback; Russia has removed several key generals from Ukraine; Obese Russian general, 67, called up to fight in Ukraine as Putin ‘scrapes the barrel’, LIVE UPDATES and MORE

In Ukraine’s South, Counterattacks Offer Kyiv Hope for Turning Back Russia:

Ukraine is looking to recapture a city crucial for its economy and stop Russian designs on advancing to the doorstep of Europe. ‘We need Kherson back.’

Kyiv’s forces in southern Ukraine are fighting to extend one of their most successful counterattacks against Russia and push beyond this small, artillery-scarred village to chip away at Moscow’s presence in a strategically vital area along the Black Sea.

Even as Russian forces push Ukrainian units back in the eastern Donbas area, Kyiv has launched attacks in recent weeks and months with the aim of clawing back territory from Russian positions in the south.

Kyiv’s southern push seeks to draw Russian forces away from the east, free up the country’s southern ports that once exported billions of dollars of wheat and disrupt the landbridge Moscow has sought to establish between Russia, Crimea and onward to the European Union’s doorstep.

Russia was able to occupy a swath of southern Ukraine in the first days of the war in late February with little resistance, but Ukrainian forces started to push back at the end of March, making tactical counterattacks. Late last month, the Ukrainian military said they had managed to capture positions in three small towns, Andriyivka, Bilohirka and Krynytsia.

“The Russians were pushed back from their positions and they’ll never take them back,” said Maj. Nazar, a deputy commander of a battalion in Ukraine’s 63rd Brigade who gave only his first name. “The operation was massive and it took some time, but it gave us the result we needed.”

Ukraine has reeled from last week’s fall of Severodonetsk, a small town in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. For two months, Ukrainian forces held off the Russians, who scored an important symbolic win in a region that the Kremlin says is central to victory in Ukraine.

But in the south, the prospect of taking back the strategically vital city of Kherson has offered Ukrainian forces a glimmer of hope. Ukrainian officials say counter-offensives have pushed through a first line of Russian defense, said Ukrainian officials last week. President Volodymyr Zelensky heralded more victories in the region, days after he publicly awarded medals to officers serving on the southern front.

“In our south we are…gradually liberating Kherson,” he said in an address last week. —>READ MORE HERE

Ukraine will fight on from higher ground after pullback, spy chief says:

Ukraine will defend its eastern front from higher ground in the city of Lysychansk after withdrawing from a Russian onslaught in its sister city and Kyiv will try to stabilise the situation, Ukraine’s military spy chief said on Saturday.

Russia has been replenishing forces with reservists as part of a covert mobilisation and it is pointless to hope Moscow will simply run out of troops in this war, Kyrylo Budanov told Reuters.

The 36-year-old head of the Defence Ministry’s shadowy Main Directorate of Intelligence spoke in a rare interview in Kyiv hours before Russia claimed full control of the city of Sievierodonetsk where Ukrainian forces had been bombarded for weeks. read more

Russia used the tactic “it used in Mariupol: wiping the city from the face of the earth. Given the conditions, holding the defence in the ruins and open fields is no longer possible. So the Ukrainian forces are leaving for higher ground to continue the defence operations,” he said.

The only way path to victory for Ukraine, he said, was through sheer military force in order to retake all its territory.

“The strategy is very simple. Stabilise the situation. Receive the required amount of equipment and prepare the required amount of forces and means to start the counter-offensive to return all our territory,” he said. —>READ MORE HERE

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