(Reuters) -President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces were inflicting heavy losses in a counteroffensive in the eastern Donetsk region, the main theater of Ukraine’s more than three-and-a-half-year war.
Zelenskiy’s account, based on a report from Ukraine’s top commander, contrasts with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin’s speech to senior Russian officials a day earlier, in which he said Moscow’s forces maintained the strategic initiative in all frontline sectors.
Zelenskiy, speaking in his late-night video address, said he spoke for nearly an hour with top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi, with “particular attention to operation Dobropillia, our counteroffensive.” He described numerous victims in the area.
Ukraine has pointed to successes in Dobropillia, just north of the Pokrovsk logistics hub, one of the key targets in Russia’s slow advance westward through the Donetsk region.
Ukrainian forces, Zelenskiy said, were “defending in all other directions,” referring specifically to Kupiansk, a largely destroyed city in northeastern Ukraine under intense Russian attacks for months.
He also described conditions as “difficult” around Novopavlivka, further south in the Zaporizhzhia region, but said that “our active defensive actions there are yielding good results.”
Reuters could not independently verify either side’s battlefield accounts.
Putin told senior officials on Tuesday in northwestern Russia, near the country’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, that Russia had reclaimed nearly 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles) of land in Ukraine by 2025.
He said Ukrainian forces were withdrawing from all sectors of the front and that even if kyiv tried to strike deep into Russian territory, it would not help.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday it had taken control of the village of Novohryhorivka in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the latest in a series of almost daily announcements about newly captured settlements.
The regional governor of Kherson, in southern Ukraine, said Russian strikes on Wednesday had killed three people in and around the city of the same name.
And the governor of the Sumy region, on the northern border with Russia, said three people were killed in Russian drone strikes in different districts.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Matthew Lewis)