Russian army says captured village in Ukraine's Kharkiv region

MOSCOW: Russia’s army said Tuesday its forces had captured a large village in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, the latest territorial gain for Moscow’s advancing troops as Kyiv warned of intense fighting in two other key frontline towns.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had “liberated” the village of Dvorichna, which had a pre-conflict population of more than 3,000.

The village — located across the strategic Oskil river — was seized by Russian forces at the start of their full-scale military offensive in 2022, before being re-taken by Kyiv months later in a swift counter-offensive.

But Ukraine’s army has been pushed back over the past year, outgunned and outmanned by Russia’s troops across the 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front line.

Kyiv’s army said Tuesday its forces were repelling fierce Russian attacks in the embattled towns of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk in the eastern Donetsk region.

“With the support of artillery, the enemy continues to storm our positions at the Kramatorsk and Toretsk sectors,” Ukraine’s Khortytsya troop group, tasked with holding ground at key sectors of the industrial region, said in a statement on social media.

“Heavy fighting continues in the urban areas of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk,” it added.

Ukrainian military bloggers, with links to the defence ministry, say Russian forces are advancing on the flanks of Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town that was home to some 12,000 people before the conflict.

Toretsk is one of a string of mining towns in the Donetsk region and Russian forces have been fighting for months to capture it.

“Almost 140 artillery shells were fired at our fortifications in Chasiv Yar, and more than 80 in Toretsk,” Khortytsya said, without specifying over what period of time.

Eight people meanwhile were wounded in overnight Russian attacks in the southern Odesa region and the eastern Kharkiv region, local officials said.

Ukraine’s airforce said that its air defence systems had downed 65 drones over 13 regions including Kyiv, where AFP journalists heard explosions ringing out.

In Odesa, four people were wounded including a 91-year-old man and a school was damaged in the centre of the city, officials said.

An attack on the northeastern city of Kharkiv meanwhile sparked a large blaze at a “production facility”, prosecutors said, forcing two people, including a nine-year-old girl to seek medical attention, while a drone strike on a village in the suburbs set a house on fire, wounding three people.