MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian forces are storming four towns in eastern Ukraine as Moscow’s forces push to gain control over the whole of the Donbas region, according to pro-Russian bloggers.
Russian forces are fighting with Ukrainian troops in the eastern Ukrainian towns of Selydove, Hirnyk, Kurakhove and Toretsk, according to posts by bloggers on Tuesday.
Yuri Podolyaka, a prominent Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, said that Russian forces were attacking Hirnyk from several directions and fighting in the centre of the town, which had a pre-war population of over 10,000 people.
Podolyaka said that fighting was also going on in the outskirts of Kurakhove and Selydove, which each had populations of about 20,000 before the war.
“Events in this sector of the front are unfolding rapidly,” Podolyaka said. His accounts were confirmed by multiple other prominent pro-Russian bloggers, though the Russian defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Russian forces, which President Vladimir Putin ordered into Ukraine in February 2022, advanced in September at their fastest rate since March 2022, according to open source data, despite Ukraine taking a part of Russia’s Kursk region.
Ukraine’s General Staff said that Russian forces had tried to attack at multiple places along the front but that Ukraine had repelled the attacks.
“In the Pokrovsk direction, Russian invaders tried to dislodge our units from the occupied lines in the areas of Myrolyubivka, Promin, Lysivka, Selydove settlements,” it said.
“Our defenders repelled 56 assaults. The greatest concentration of enemy attacks was near Selydove.”
“In the Kurakhove direction, the defence forces repelled 47 attacks near Hirnyk, Novodmytrivka, Hostre, Katerynivka, and Antonivka, where the enemy tried to break through the defence of our troops.”
(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
