The Ukrainian military continued to pound targets across southern Ukraine on Tuesday as they sought to disrupt Russian supply lines, degrade Russia’s combat capabilities and isolate Russian forces, part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad and coordinated counteroffensive.

The Ukrainian military said that its forces had broken through Russia’s first line of defence in multiple points along the front in the occupied Kherson region, but officials offered little detail and their claims could not be independently verified.

Western military analysts emphasized that Russian forces have had months to reinforce multiple lines of defence across the south, making any Ukrainian advance likely to be tough and bloody. It remained unclear whether the strikes marked the start of a long-anticipated counteroffensive or were simply an intensification of weeks of Ukrainian counterattacks.

The British military intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Ukrainian brigades had “increased the weight of artillery fires in frontline sectors across southern Ukraine” but noted that it was “not yet possible to confirm the extent of Ukrainian advances”.

The southern front stretches across a vast landscape of farms, fields and grassland, and includes territory that Moscow’s forces seized in the initial phase of their invasion in February. Ukraine has staged sporadic counterattacks in the region for months — including using long-range weapons supplied by Western allies to strike behind Russian lines — and Russia has been racing to reinforce its positions. By early August, military analysts estimated that Russia had as many as 25,000 soldiers west of the Dnipro river in the Kherson region, forming three defensive lines.

Those forces now seem to be the most vulnerable, as Ukraine appears able to strike all of the major river crossings that Russia needs to supply those troops. Still, the Ukrainian military high command maintained a general silence on troop movements.

Nataliya Gumenyuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command, declined to name any locations where Ukrainian forces had advanced or any villages that had been recaptured because she said that doing so could make them targets.

“You need to understand these villages are still in the vulnerable zone and could be hit by the enemy artillery and aviation,” she told a news conference. Russia at first denied that the Ukrainians were engaged in offensive operations in Kherson, then said that all enemy thrusts had been repelled at significant cost to the Ukrainians — but offered no evidence to support the claim. Kirill Stremousov, the Russia-appointed proxy leader in Kherson, said that the Ukrainians could soon find themselves outnumbered and outmanoeuvred.

“This a steppe where there is nowhere to hide,” he said in a statement. “This region can become a real trap for the Ukrainian forces.”

Russian lawmaker

Ilya Ponomaryov, a Russian former lawmaker who now opposes the Kremlin from exile in Ukraine, is under investigation for spreading false information about the Russian army, TASS news agency quoting a court in Moscow said on Tuesday.

It said investigators had requested his “arrest in absentia”, which effectively makes him a wanted man and means he would face certain detention if he returned to Russia.

Under a law passed eight days after Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, the “public dissemination of deliberately false information” about the armed forces is punishable by fines or, in the most serious cases, up to 15 years in jail.

(New York Times News Service)