JAKARTA - Ukrainian authorities have announced that Russian troops have begun an attack on President Volodymyr Zelensky's hometown of Kryvyi Rih, warning Moscow could prepare for a new offensive operation in southern Ukraine.
Russia controls much of southern Ukraine that it seized in the initial phase of its February 24 invasion, but Kyiv has said it will retaliate. It said Tuesday it had retaken 53 villages in the occupied Kherson region.
In its regular updates on the war in the south, Ukraine's southern military command described the situation as tense, saying Russia attacked along the front lines on Aug. 2.
The steel-producing town of Kryvyi Rih, where President Zelensky grew up, is located about 50 km (30 miles) from the southern front.
"(Russia) has started to make attack groups towards Kryvyi Rih. It is also likely that the enemy is preparing a hostile counter-offensive with further plans to reach the administrative boundaries of the Kherson region," the southern military command said.
Ukraine has tried to increase pressure on Russia's position in the strategically important Kherson Black Sea region, using long-range weapons supplied by the West to carry out attacks on Russian supply lines and ammunition dumps.
In a statement, the Ukrainian military said Russian forces were looking into the region's basement to turn it into a bomb shelter to store military hardware.
Late Tuesday, President Zelensky described fighting in parts of the eastern front in the highly industrialized Donbas as "hell" in his evening address to Ukrainians.
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Russia has not claimed a major territorial advantage in its invasion since claiming to have seized the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine about a month ago.
But on Tuesday, Ukraine's military command acknowledged that Russia had "partially succeeded" in the "Donetsk-Pisky direction" around the Russian-held city of Donetsk and Russian-backed separatists.
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