Impressive.....

Ukrainian military claims "impressive results" against Russia in Kherson

Vasco Cotovio in London and Olga Voitovych in Kyiv

Ukraine's military has claimed it is achieving “impressive results” against Russian forces on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson.

“Over the past three days, we have quite impressive results of our combat work,” the spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Southern Command said in a national broadcast Tuesday.

“We have managed to hit and destroy artillery pieces, tanks, vehicles, armored vehicles, and enemy air defense systems,” Natalia Humeniuk said. “In other words, our work on clearing the front line of the east bank is quite powerful, but we are still working in a counter-battery mode.”

Humeniuk hinted that further developments would be expected in the near future. She went on to say Russian evacuations from the banks of the Dnipro were also facilitating Ukrainian operations.

“They [the Russians] are also clearing the territory of the local population, which makes our work much easier, because they are trying to evacuate the locals there where they are moving their units and moving to new locations,” she said.

“Therefore, it is safer for us to carry out our work at combat positions where they are no longer hiding behind the locals.”

Some background: Speaking to CNN earlier this week, Yurii Sobolevskyi, first deputy head of Ukraine’s Kherson regional council, said about 30% of the pre-war population remains in the temporarily occupied territories of the Kherson region.

“It is very difficult to calculate because we have no access to data on the number of active subscribers from mobile operators and other means,” he said.

In the interview, Sobolevskyi claimed that for the past two weeks the Russians had been trying to coerce civilians in towns on the river to leave their homes.