Ukraine claims to have retaken another village from Russian forces

KYIV (Reuters): Ukraine said on Monday its forces had regained control of the southeastern village of Rivnopil as they continue to advance against Russian forces after launching a counteroffensive.

The village appeared to be the ninth recaptured by Ukraine this month in the early stages of an offensive in which Ukrainian officials have signalled that the main push is yet to come.

“(Ukrainian) Defence forces have brought Rivnopil back under our control,” Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

She did not say when Ukrainian forces had recaptured Rivnopil, which lies just to the west of a cluster of villages that Kyiv says it recaptured earlier in the counter-offensive.

An unverified 13-second video posted on Telegram by Ukrainian land forces, showing a group of Ukrainian soldiers in front of the remains of a building with a Ukrainian flag flying from a post, indicated the village was retaken on Sunday.

“Today on June 25, 2023, the fighters of the Second Battalion of the 31st Mechanised Brigade liberated the village of Rivnopil,” one of the soldiers in the video said.

Using a derogatory term for Russian soldiers, he said: “The orcs are fleeing, we are moving ahead.”

Maliar said in an earlier statement that Ukrainian forces had liberated about 130 square km (50 square miles) in the south since the counterattack began.

“There are already liberated territories and our advance continues,” Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukrainian forces on the “Tavria”, or southern, front, said on Telegram.

He said on Saturday Kyiv had also taken back land near Krasnohorivka in the Donetsk region that had been occupied since 2014 when fighting broke out with Russian-backed breakaway groups in eastern Ukraine but gave no other details.

Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, still holds swathes of territory in the east and south. It did not immediately comment on events in Rivnopil, and Reuters was unable to verify the situation on the battlefield.