Russian forces make new push into northeast Ukraine
PHOTO CAPTION: Illustrative photo — Russian service members ride an armored personnel carrier during Ukraine-Russia conflict on the outskirts of the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine April 12, 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
By Tom Balmforth and Yuliia Dysa
KYIV - Russian forces have captured four villages in Ukraine's northeastern Sumy region, the local governor said, confirming a battlefield setback for Kyiv after its forces were pushed out of Russian areas across the nearby border.
Ukrainian forces used Sumy region as a launch pad to seize a chunk of Russia's neighbouring Kursk region last year before being largely driven out by April. The area has been pounded for months by Russian guided bomb attacks and other strikes.
"The enemy is continuing attempts to advance with the aim of setting up a so-called 'buffer zone'," Sumy Governor Oleh Hryhorov wrote on Facebook.
He said the villages of Novenke, Basivka, Veselivka and Zhuravka had been occupied, adding that residents had long been evacuated.
Russia's Defence Ministry said on Monday it had taken the nearby village of Bilovody, implying a further advance in the more than three-year war.
Though Russia's offensive activity is concentrated in the eastern Donetsk region, Moscow's inroads into northeastern Ukraine show how it is stretching Kyiv's forces on multiple fronts.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly warned that Russia is preparing new offensives against Sumy as well as the northeastern Kharkiv and southeastern Zaporizhzhia regions.
"There is much evidence that they are preparing new offensive operations. Russia is counting on further war," he said on Monday, without elaborating.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a trip to the Kursk region in March, made his latest in a string of calls for his military to consider establishing a "buffer zone" along Russia's border.
Ukrainian officials have said for weeks that Russian troops are trying to make inroads into Sumy region, the main city of which lies less than 30 km from the border.
Russian forces, attacking in small groups on motorcycles and supported by drones, have been widening the area where they have been carrying out assaults, a spokesperson for Ukraine's border guard service said.
Hryhorov, the regional governor, said Ukraine's troops were "keeping the situation under control, inflicting precise fire damage on the enemy".
Moscow says Ukrainian troops have been ousted from Kursk, but Kyiv says it still has some troops there.
Ukrainian military blog DeepState said at the weekend that Russian forces had for the first time "been able to take up positions" along a line of border villages in Sumy. On Tuesday, it estimated that Russia held 62.6 square km (24.2 square miles) of land in the region.
A Russian missile strike on the region's main city, also called Sumy, killed 36 people last month.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth, Yuliia Dysa, Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Leslie Adler, Alistair Bell and Helen Popper)
