The Russian troops are withdrawing from Ukraine's second-largest city after weeks of heavy bombardment, 🎀said Ukrainian military on Saturday.
The development comes as Ukrainian and Russian forces engaged in a grinding battle for the country's eastern industrial heartland, which is now the focus of Moscow's invasion after withdrawal from the area surroundi♒ng the c🍸apital Kyiv and the country's north in April.
Ukraine's gener🍃al staff said the Russians were pulling back from the northeastern city of Kharkiv and focusing on guarding supply routes, while launching mortar, artillery and airstrikes in th🐈e eastern Donetsk province in order to “deplete Ukrainian forces and destroy fortifications”.
Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said Ukraine was “enterin🌌g a new - long-ter🎉m - phase of the war”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainians were doing their “maximum” to drive out the invaders and that the outcomeꦿ of the war would depend on support from Europe and other allies.
“No one today can predict how long this war will last,” said Zelenskyy🔯 in his nightly video address on Fr꧃iday.
Russia's offensive in the Donbas, a mining and industrial region which Moscow-backed separatists have pa﷽rtially controlled since 2014, appeared to be turning into a back-and-forth slog with no major 💃breakthroughs on either side.
Before the war, Ukraine had its most highly trained soldiers in the region to stave off the Russia-backed rebels.🎀
Russia has captured some villages and towns during its invasion. The Ukrainian military chief for the Donbas' Luhansk province said on Friday that Russian troops had nearly full control of Rubizhne, a city with a pre-war population of around ꦏ55,000.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine's forces had also made progress, retaking si🗹x Ukrainian towns or villages in th꧂e past day.
Western officials said Ukraine hadღ driven Russian forces back around Kharkiv.
The largely Russian-speaking city was a Russian key military objective in the early phase🦂 of the war, when Moscow was still hoping to capture and hold major Ukrainian cities.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based th🐽ink tank, said Ukraine “appears to have won the Battle of Kharkiv”. It said, “Ukrainian forces prevented Russian troops from encircling, let alone seizing Kharkiv, and then expelled them from around the city.”
Regional governor Oleh Sinegubov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app that there had been no shelling attacks on Kharkiv in the past day. He sa🌊id Ukraine had launched a counteroffensive near Izyum, a city 125 kilometers (78 miles) south of Kharkiv that has be🔜en under effective Russian control since at least the beginning of April.
Fighting was fierce on the Siversky Donets River near the city of Severodonetsk, where Ukraine has launched counterattacks but failed to halt Rus⛄sia's advance, said Oleh Zhdanov, an independent Ukrainian military analyst.
“The fate of a large portion of the﷽ Ukrainian army is being decided — there are about 40,000 Ukrainian soldiers,” he said.
However, Russian forces suffered heavy losses in a Ukrainian attack that destroyed a pontoon ജbridge they were usin♚g to try to cross the same river — the largest in eastern Ukraine — in the town of Bilohorivka, Ukrainian and British officials said, in another sign of Moscow's struggle to salvage a war gone awry.
Uk꧋raine's airborne comman🍬d released photos and video of what it said was a damaged Russian pontoon bridge over the Siversky Donets River and at least 73 destroyed or damaged Russian military vehicles nearby.
Britain's Defense Ministry said Russia lost “significant armoured maneuver element🃏s" of at least one battalion tactical ꦫgroup in the attack. A Russian battalion tactical group consists of about 1,000 troops.
It said the risky river crossing w🅺as a sign of “the pressure the Russian commanders are un🔜der to make progress in their operations in eastern Ukraine”.
Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation that🌜 Ukrainians were doing everything they could to drive out the Russians, but ꦛ“no one today can predict how long this war will last”.
He added, “This will depend, unfortunately, not only on our people, who are already giving their maximum. This will depend on our partners, on European countries, on the entire free woꦚrld.”
In the ruined sout𝓡hern port of Mariupol, Ukrainian fighters holed up in a steel plant faced continued Russian attacks on the last stronghold of resistance in the city. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine's Azov Regiment, said his troops will hold out “as long as they can" despite shortages of ammunition, food, water and medicine.
Ukraine's deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, told the country's Suspilne news 𓂃outlet Saturday that Ukrainia♚n authorities are negotiating the evacuation of 60 severely wounded troops from the steelworks. She said Russia had not agreed to the evacuation of all wounded fighters at the plant, who number in the hundreds.
An aide to Mariupol's mayor said between 150,000 and 170,000 civilians remain in the city, which had a prewar population of more than 400,000. In a Telegram post, Petro Andryushchenko said the residents were “hostages” of the occupying Russian forces, “with almost no chance to escape 🔴to🐼 Ukraine.”
(With AP inputs)
