Ukraine says Russia eases attacks on Bakhmut to regroup
Ukraine’s defense minister says Russian attacks have eased as Moscow’s troops are “replaced and regrouped.”
Russian troops have temporarily eased their attacks on the besieged eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to regroup and bolster their capabilities, a senior official in Kiev said.
Separately, senior Ukrainian officials indicated on Saturday that their troops were ready to launch a long-promised counter-offensive to recapture territory Russia had taken since the war began.
Wagner’s Russian private army this week began handing over positions to regular troops after declaring full control of Bakhmut after the war’s longest and bloodiest battle.
In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces continued to attack, but overall offensive activity had decreased.
“Yesterday and today there have been no active battles – neither in the city nor on the flanks,” she wrote on Saturday, adding that Moscow’s troops instead shelled Bakhmut’s outskirts and approaches.
“The decrease in enemy offensive activity is due to troops being replaced and regrouped,” said Maliar. “The enemy is trying to strengthen its own capabilities.”
Kiev is expected to soon launch a long-awaited counter-offensive to recapture Russian-held territory.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told the BBC the advance could begin “tomorrow, the day after tomorrow or a week from now”.
Presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak told British newspaper The Guardian that preparatory operations, such as destroying supply lines or blowing up depots, had already begun.
Ukraine’s top general Valeriy Zaluzhnyi posted a tightly produced video on Saturday showing Ukrainian troops swearing an oath and preparing for battle.
“The time has come to give back what is ours,” he wrote.
‘Large-scale provocation’
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military intelligence has claimed, without providing evidence, that Russia is plotting a “massive provocation” at a nuclear power plant it occupies in the country’s southeast with the aim of disrupting an imminent Ukrainian counter-offensive.
A statement released Friday by the intelligence agency of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry alleged that Russian forces would attack the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, and then report a radioactive leak to trigger an international probe that would monitor hostilities. pause and would give the Russian forces the respite they need to regroup ahead of the counter-offensive.
To make that happen, Russia “disrupted the rotation of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s permanent observation mission scheduled for Saturday,” the statement said. It offered no evidence to support any of the claims.
There was no immediate comment from the IAEA or Russian officials on the allegations.
The White House said it is closely monitoring the situation and has seen no evidence of any radioactive material leaking.
The allegations echoed similar statements Moscow regularly makes, claiming without evidence that Kiev is plotting provocations with various dangerous weapons or substances and then accusing Russia of war crimes.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is one of the 10 largest nuclear power plants in the world. It is located in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine. The plant’s six reactors have been shut down for months, but power and qualified personnel are still needed to operate critical cooling systems and other safety features.
Fighting near it has repeatedly disrupted power supplies and fueled fears of a possible catastrophe like the one at Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, where a reactor exploded in 1986, spewing deadly radiation, contaminating a vast area during the worst nuclear disaster in the world.