KYIV — The Ukrainian army has liberated a critical village in the Donetsk region, widening their breach into Russian defenses on the southern front.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar confirmed the liberation of Urozhaine on Wednesday morning. Urozhaine is located a few kilometers southeast of Staromaiorske, which Ukrainian forces pushed Russia out of last month.
The village’s liberation is a significant victory for the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is slowly progressing through heavily mined Russian lines of defense, Ukrainian military analyst Roman Svitan told POLITICO.
“Russians had an established stronghold in Urozhaine alongside Mokri Yaly River that used to stall our offensive operations in that area. Taking it back under our control, Ukrainian forces minimized the danger of Russian attack from flanks and got a key to a faster progress through Russian defense lines up to Staromlynivka village, where Russians have their main defensive line,” Svitan said. “That is why Russians were fighting so hard for Urozhaine.”
Ukrainian forces began their assault on Urozhaine on August 8, fending off a Russian counterattack on August 13 and eventually pushing the Kremlin’s occupying troops out.
Earlier Tuesday, Ukrainian military analyst Colonel Petro Chernyk said during a briefing that Ukraine’s strategic goal is to enter the northern Azov region, where Russian-occupied Mariupol and Berdiansk are located. According to Chernyk, while the Ukrainian army struggles on the eastern front, it has a good chance to collapse the Russian front in the south.
But the liberation of the villages has been costly for the Ukrainian army. During a briefing Monday, Maliar said Ukrainian forces have faced heavily mined areas, taking constant artillery fire and attacks by Russian aircraft. The liberated village has been devastated, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Ukrainian TV.
According to Kyrylenko, some 80 percent of the residential sector of the village was destroyed by heavy fighting. Before Russia invaded in February 2022, Urozhaine was home to around 500 people. The Ukrainian government managed to evacuate most of them in the first month of the Russian full-scale invasion.
Some, however, had remained.
“As soon as Ukrainian armed forces entered the village, they managed to find and evacuate three elderly people, who managed to survive there all this time after the mass evacuation the Ukrainian government conducted last year,” Kyrylenko said.
