INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Ukrainian forces were reported to be recapturing towns along the west bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine on Monday, with Moscow
forced to yield territory along a second major front line just days after claiming to have annexed it.The scale of the Ukrainian advance was
unconfirmed, with Kyiv maintaining all but complete silence about the situation in the area
But Russian military bloggers described a Ukrainian tank advance through dozens of kilometers of territory along the bank of the river,
Reuters reported.In one of the rare comments by a Ukrainian official on the situation, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior
ministry, posted what he said was video of a Ukrainian soldier waving a flag in Zolota Balka, downriver from the former front line.Rob Lee,
a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think-tank, cited Russian bloggers as reporting their forces falling back as far as
Dudchany & 40 km (25 miles) downriver from where they had opposed Ukrainian troops a day earlier.When this many Russian channels are
sounding the alarm, it usually means they&re in trouble,& he wrote on Twitter.A Ukrainian advance along the Dnipro river could trap
thousands of Russian troops on the far side, cut off from all supplies
The river is enormously wide, and Ukraine has already destroyed the major crossings.The reports were the first to describe a rapid Ukrainian
advance in the south of the country since the war began, and come just a day after Ukraine routed Russian troops in a major bastion, Lyman,
on the opposite end of the front in the east.The advances in the east and the south & some of the biggest of the war so far & have all taken
place in territory that President Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed from Ukraine only on Friday, with a celebratory concert by the
Kremlin walls.They also come amid reports of chaos in a mobilisation ordered less than two weeks ago by Putin, which has seen tens of
thousands of Russian men suddenly called up into the military and tens of thousands of others fleeing abroad.The post Ukrainian forces
advance in south as Russia yields on second front first appeared on Ariana News.
