WorthyNews: Ukraine Losing More Territory As Russia Advances Further (Worthy News In-Depth)

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By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent, Worthy News

KYIV/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Ukraine was rapidly losing more territory Sunday with Ukrainian and Russian officials confirming that Russia’s military had reached the outskirts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in their first approach to the Ukrainian province since the war began in February 2022.

Additionally, Russian military units appeared to be within 18 miles (29 kilometers) of the city of Sumy, three years after Ukraine forced them out of the northern region.

Independent monitors confirmed Kremlin claims to have retaken the village of Loknia, which had been liberated along with the rest of the Sumy region during Ukraine’s 2022 spring counteroffensive.

It is the latest settlement in the region to be retaken by Putin’s forces in recent weeks, witnesses said.

The city of Sumy, which is 200 miles (320 kilometers) north-east of Kyiv, the capital, was never occupied by Russia since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

However, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces have been bearing down on the regional capital.

The latest changes in the battlefields followed previous warnings by Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russia “had concentrated 50,000 troops” on the Sumy front, and a series of settlements in the area have since fallen.

REGIONAL GOVERNOR

The regional governor, Oleh Hryhorov, announced the mandatory evacuation of 11 more villages on May 31, bringing the total number of evacuated settlements in the Sumy region to 213.

The Russian defence ministry further claimed on Sunday that forces had reached the western frontier of the Donetsk region, in the east of Ukraine, and were advancing in the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in three years of full-scale war.

The ministry said forces from a tank unit had “reached the western border of the Donetsk People’s Republic and are continuing to develop an offensive in the Dnipropetrovsk region”.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Defence Forces said: “The enemy does not abandon its intentions to enter the Dnipropetrovsk region. Our soldiers are courageously and professionally holding their section of the front, disrupting the occupier’s plans. This work does not stop for a minute.”

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) maps do not yet show the invasion of the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to analysis by the independent Russian-language news channel Agency News.

However, according to the OSINT project DeepState, the maps show that the combat zone is close to the region’s border.

Pro-Russian online commentator Yuriy Podolyaka wrote about the announcement on social media platform Telegram, saying: “As they say in such cases, now officially…But in fact, we have already entered there on a fairly wide front.”

RUSSIAN ADVANCING

The advance of Russian forces into the industrial region of Dnipropetrovsk would be a symbolic and strategic setback for Kyiv after the morale-boosting results of Operation Spiderweb, in which its drones attacked some of the Kremlin’s nuclear-capable bombers deep inside Russia, analysts said.

The Kremlin claimed in 2022 to have annexed the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions despite not having complete control of them. Dnipro, the administrative capital of Dnipropetrovsk, has been under near-constant fire since the invasion began, according to people in the region.

Independent monitors said there was also evidence that Russia was advancing on the city of Kostyantynivka, in the Donetsk region, from several directions.

The city has been a key logistical hub for Ukraine’s forces since February 2022, when Putin launched his full-scale invasion.

A Ukrainian military spokesperson, Dmytro Zaporozhets, confirmed that Russian forces were trying to “build a bridgehead for an attack” on Kostyantynivka.

Ukraine’s cities are also bracing for fresh night-time missile and drone attacks after U.S. officials said they did not believe Russia had fully responded to Sunday and Monday’s Operation Spiderweb, when 117 drones struck aircraft inside Russia.

Numerous people were already killed and injured in massive strikes in several cities in Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv and Kharkiv, near the border with Russia.

ONGOING CLASHES

With clashes ongoing, Kyiv and Moscow also quarreled over exchanging the living and the dead: Kyiv and Moscow agreed to release all wounded soldiers and those under 25, equating to more than 1,000 people from each side.

Russia said it would also hand back the remains of 6,000 killed Ukrainian soldiers.

However, the Kremlin accused Ukraine over the weekend of not turning up to collect the bodies already at the border and prevaricating over Monday’s prisoner exchange.

Russian officials said they would continue to deliver further bodies to the border. It was another reminder of the grim consequences of a war in which over 1 million people are believed to have been killed or wounded.

Ukrainian officials accused Russia of playing “dirty games” and not sticking to the agreed parameters for the exchange by including personnel in a list of prisoners they wished recovered who were not eligible. “The Ukrainian side has unexpectedly postponed for an indefinite period both the acceptance of the bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war,” Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said on social media.

Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said no date had been set for the prisoner exchange. “Unfortunately, instead of constructive dialogue, we are again faced with manipulations. We call on the Russian side to stop playing dirty games and return to constructive work to bring people back to both sides and to clearly implement the agreement in the coming days”.

Yet there were no signs of that happening Sunday, with recent peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey, seemingly all but forgotten. U.S. President Donald J. Trump, who once pledged to bring the war to an end within a day, has admitted that ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II seems more complicated than previously thought.

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