Fresh from victories in Ukraine’s northeast and east, the Ukrainian military on Tuesday expelled Russian forces from a town in the south, a sign that its tactic of attacking in several places at once has left its adversaries off balance and losing ground.

After a weekend of significant military gains in eastern cities like Lyman, Ukraine pushed farther into Russian-held territory, expanding its campaign in yet another direction as Moscow struggled to mount a response and hold the line.

A Ukrainian marine unit, the 35th Brigade, released a video showing soldiers waving the national flag from the steel lattice of a communications tower they said was in Davydiv Brid, a strategically important town in the Kherson region in the south.

“Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the marines!” a soldier says in the video.

The location where the video was filmed could not be independently verified, but a Russian-appointed official in the Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, confirmed that the Russian Army had withdrawn from Davydiv Brid. And prowar Russian bloggers warned that Russian forces in Kherson — one of four regions Moscow has illegally annexed — were facing a dire situation.

Ukrainian soldiers on the front line claimed they had captured three other villages in the south on Tuesday, a Ukrainian news outlet reported.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared to confirm those advances in a Twitter post. But as much as Ukrainians celebrate the sight of the Russian military on its heels, Moscow’s retreat has pulled back the curtain on a panoramic wasteland left in its wake.

For some Ukrainian soldiers, the victories were bittersweet.

They returned to towns left in ruins after being fought over twice.

“We are liberating the land, but without people on it,” one Ukrainian private, Vitaly Zagoruyko, lamented as he stood guard near a blown-up bridge on the Siversky Donetsriver.

Not that long ago, Sviatohirsk was a bustling town that catered to tourists and pilgrims visiting a revered Orthodox monastery. But on Tuesday, that seemed in the distant past as a New York Times correspondent wandered the hallways of the Roche Royal Hotel there.

Nearly every window was blown out, and the hotel’s rooms and hallways were littered with discarded wrappers from Russian rations.

New York Times News Service