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Ukraine said on Saturday it had recaptured a swathe of the battlefield city of Severodonetsk, where intense fighting continued, in a rare counter-offensive against Russia’s main assault force that had been steadily advancing in the east.
The Ukrainian claim could not be independently verified and Moscow said its own forces were making gains there. But it was the first time Kyiv has claimed to have launched a big counter-attack in Severodonetsk after days of yielding ground there.
Ukraine will fight off Russia’s invasion, its president has said, while the Kremlin pledged to persist until “all our goals have been achieved” as Moscow’s war entered its 100th day with Russian troops pounding the Donbas region.
“Victory shall be ours,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video featuring the same key ministers and advisers who appeared with him in a defiant broadcast on 24 February, the day his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, launched his unprovoked assault.
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Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday that the eastern Ukrainian town of Lyman had fallen under the full control of Russian and Russian-backed forces in the region.
Pro-Russian separatists from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic had said on Friday that they had fully captured the town, a railway hub west of Sievierodonetsk.
Five Turkish soldiers were killed Tuesday in clashes with Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, Turkey’s defense ministry said. Two other soldiers were wounded in the fighting.
The clashes took place during Turkey’s latest cross-border offensive against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which maintains bases in northern Iraq. Turkey launched its latest offensive, named Operation Claw Lock last month in northern Iraq’s Metina, Zap and Avashin-Basyan regions.
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Russia’s siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol stuttered towards its end on Thursday, with hundreds of fighters still holed up in the Azovstal steel works and some 1,700 who have already surrendered facing an uncertain fate.
A full abandonment of the bunkers and tunnels of the bombed-out plant would end the most destructive siege of a war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.