Russia deploys 170,000 troops for push in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Zelenskyy says

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia has deployed around 170,000 troops in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region where they are trying to capture the stronghold of Pokrovsk in a major push for a battlefield victory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday.

“The situation in Pokrovsk is difficult,” Zelenskyy said, while also rejecting recent Russian claims that the devastated city is surrounded after more than a year of fighting. He acknowledged that some Russian units had infiltrated the city, but insisted that Ukrainian defenders are weeding them out.

“There are Russians in Pokrovsk,” Zelenskyy told a media briefing in Kyiv. “They are being destroyed, gradually destroyed, because, well, we need to preserve our personnel.”

In previous sieges during the almost four years since Russia launched its all-out invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine has pulled out of some places to avoid losing troops. Ukrainian forces are desperately short-handed against Russia’s bigger army.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently claimed that Russian forces are making significant advances on the battlefield, though their progress has been slow and costly in troops and armor.

Putin is trying to persuade the United States, which wants him to seek a peace deal, that Ukraine can’t hold out against Russian military superiority. He has also stressed what he says is Russia’s improving nuclear capability as he refuses to budge from what he says are his country’s legitimate war aims.

Ukraine has been fighting back by hitting targets inside Russia to disrupt military logistics and make Russian civilians feel the effects of war.

Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has conducted over 160 successful long-range strikes on Russia’s oil extraction and refining facilities, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, Vasyl Maliuk, told reporters at the briefing.

In September and October alone, Ukraine conducted 20 strikes on Russian oil facilities, Maliuk said.

He claimed that the strikes had brought a 20% drop in oil products on Russia’s domestic market and temporarily halted the operation of 37% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. The claims could not be independently verified.

“Clearly, we are not resting on our achievements. There are many fresh perspectives and new approaches in this work,” Maliuk said. “These include new equipment, new combat units, and new methods and means of communication.”

He said that over this year Ukraine has destroyed nearly half of Russia’s sophisticated Pantsir air defense systems, which have stopped Ukrainian long-range drones.

He also noted that last year Ukrainian forces destroyed one of Russia’s advanced new hypersonic missiles that can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, striking it on the ground at a military base inside Russia,

The Oreshnik missile, touted at the end of last year by Putin as invulnerable to air defense systems and a game-changing weapon, was hit at the Kapustin Yar military firing range near the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia, roughly 500 kilometers (300 miles) from the Ukrainian border, according to Maliuk.

Putin said a year ago that the missile was used in an attack on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, some months after Maliuk said Ukraine destroyed one of them.

Meanwhile, Russian drones struck apartment blocks in the northeastern city of Sumy overnight, injuring 11 people, including four children, and also hit the southern Odesa region’s energy infrastructure, authorities said Friday.

The war has this year been deadlier for civilians than 2024, with a 30% rise in casualties so far, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, said Friday.

Russia’s almost daily aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy production and distribution facilities are especially worrying because the winter is forecast to be much colder than last year, Schmale said at a briefing in Geneva.

Ukrainian cities have centralized public infrastructure to run water, sewage and heating systems, and the U.N. fears that denying those services to people in high-rise buildings in cities near the front line “could turn into a major crisis,” according to Schmale.

“Destroying energy production and distribution capacity as winter starts clearly impacts the civilian population and is a form of terror,” he said.

Also, the U.N. humanitarian operation is short of money to respond to acute needs, as its Ukraine funding has declined from over $4 billion in 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, to $1.1 billion this year, Schmale said.

He added that the conflict “feels increasingly like a protracted war,” as U.S.-led international peace efforts this year have come to nothing.

“We have been through phases this year where there was cautious optimism that it might end,” Schmale said. “Right now on the ground, it doesn’t feel at all like it’s ending any time soon.”

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