KYIV/KUPIANSK, Ukraine—Russian-backed forces have made some advances in eastern Ukraine, Britain said on Friday.
A British intelligence update said forces led by the private Russian military company Wagner Group had captured the villages of Optyine and Ivangrad south of the fiercely-contested town of Bakhmut, the first such advance in more than three months.
“There have been few, if any, other settlements seized by regular Russian or separatist forces since early July,” said the daily update from London, which normally focuses on Ukrainian battlefield successes.
Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in late August against Russian forces controlling the country since the start of their invasion in February, pushing them out of a part of the northeast.
Kyiv’s main focus now is Kherson—one of four partially controlled Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexed in recent weeks, and arguably the most strategically important.
Russia’s TASS news agency said evacuees from the Kherson region were expected to begin arriving in Russia on Friday, a day after a Russian-installed official suggested people could flee to Russia, especially those around Kherson city.
Kherson city controls the only land route to the Crimea peninsula and the mouth of the Dnipro river that bisects Ukraine.
Since the start of October, Ukrainian forces have burst through Russia’s front lines in the region in their biggest advance in the south since the war began, aiming to cut Russian troops off from supply lines and escape routes across the river.
Kherson lies next to the Zaporizhzhia region, also claimed by Russia, where Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant is based.
A Russian-installed official said the plant was now working according to Russian standards. It was not clear if Ukrainian workers, who had continued operating the plant under the eye of Russian troops, were still there.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a tweet separately that Russia and Ukraine were moving closer to agreeing a protection zone for the plant, where he said the situation was “untenable.”
Russia’s Wagner group was targeting Bakhmut, The British report said, to try to seize the Kramatorsk-Solviansk urban area of the eastern Donetsk region, which was among those Russia said it had annexed despite not being in full control.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported ongoing “brutal” fighting there in a video address late on Thursday.
In his address, Zelenskyy said no one had yet visited Olenivka, accusing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of inaction in upholding the rights of Ukrainian POWs.
The ICRC said it had been ready to visit for months, adding. “We cannot access by force a place of detention or internment where we have not been admitted.”
This week, Russia launched the biggest air strikes since the start of the war, firing more than 100 cruise missiles mainly at Ukraine’s electricity and heat infrastructure.
