Ukrainian forces pull back under fierce Russian pressure in Zaporizhia

Ukrainian Army reports thousands of artillery shells fired as Russians advance in southeastern Zaporizhia region.

Ukraine’s top military commander has conceded that the army’s situation has “significantly worsened” in parts of the southern Zaporizhia region, where Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from five villages after intense fighting against Russian troops.

News of the setback in Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine comes as Russia said earlier on Tuesday that its forces had pushed deeper into the eastern Ukrainian cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk.

Video footage published by Russian war bloggers shows Moscow’s troops riding motorcycles, travelling in battered cars and sitting on top of military vehicles as they poured into Pokrovsk, which Russian media has dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” due to its strategic location.

“Using its numerical superiority in personnel and materiel, the enemy advanced in fierce fighting and captured three settlements,” the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskii, said of the fighting in Zaporizhia on Tuesday.

“The situation has significantly worsened in the Oleksandrivka and Huliapole directions,” Syrskii said in a statement.

The Ukrainian Army said earlier that orders to withdraw from five villages in Zaporizhia were given after the “de facto destruction of all shelters and fortifications” following intensive Russian artillery strikes. An estimated 2,000 shells were launched at the Ukrainian positions.

Control of three other villages is also being hotly contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces northeast of the town of Huliapole in Zaporizhia, according to the Ukrainian Army.

Syrskii said that Russian forces in Zaporizhia had used poor weather conditions to their advantage, advancing under heavy fog to infiltrate between Ukrainian positions in the region. But he added that Russian forces suffered heavy losses during their attacks.

“Every metre of our land costs Russia hundreds of military lives,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was visiting the parts of the southern Kherson region not occupied by Russia on Tuesday, described the situation in Pokrovsk and Zaporizhia as “difficult, in part because of weather conditions that favour the attacks”.

The battlefield situation in Kupiansk was “somewhat easier”, he said, adding that Ukrainian forces had “achieved results there”.

Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to attempt to encircle it and threaten supply lines.

Syrskii told US media that Russia has concentrated an estimated 150,000 troops in a drive to take Pokrovsk.

Russia and Ukraine have given conflicting accounts of the battle in recent days, with Moscow claiming for days that it had encircled Pokrovsk, while Kyiv has denied the claims and asserted that it still had supply lines to neighbouring Myrnohrad.

Russia also said its forces have taken full control of the eastern part of Kupiansk in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, located to the northeast of Zaporizhia and Pokrovsk.

A Russian commander, who gave his call sign as Hunter, said his forces had taken control of an oil depot on Kupiansk’s eastern edge. In a video statement issued by Russia’s Ministry of Defence, the commander said his forces had also taken control of a series of train stops south of Kupiansk.

Military observers have noted a thinning of Ukraine’s front lines due to a severe shortage of soldiers and massive Russian drone superiority, which has led to advances in several locations along the front line in the more than three and a half years of war.