Thousands of Russian troops retreated in the face of a lightning Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region that threatens to derail the Kremlin’s bid to cement control of Ukraine’s east.
A local Moscow-backed official and pro-Russian military bloggers said Saturday Kremlin forces had pulled out of Izyum, a staging post for the campaign in Donbas, to avoid being encircled.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry also tweeted a photo it said was of the liberation of Balakliya, to the southwest of Kupyansk, with troops shown raising a Ukrainian flag in the town center. “A hasty retreat will inevitably lead to heavy losses by the retreating troops in equipment and munitions and — most sensitive of all — in people,” Girkin said in a Telegram post.
“The situation for the Russian armed forces in the battles near Kharkiv is the hardest,” Yevgeny Poddubny, a war correspondent of State Russian TV channel VGTRK, said on his Telegram channel on Saturday.After pulling back following a failed bid to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Kremlin forces since April switched their attention to Donbas, the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
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