Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register KYIV, Aug 3 (Reuters) – Ukraine said on Wednesday that Russia had begun building a military strike force targeting President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih and warned that Moscow may be preparing new offensive operations in southern Ukraine. Russia holds swathes of southern Ukraine it seized in the early stages of its February 24 invasion, but Kyiv has said it will launch a counterattack. He said on Tuesday that he had already recaptured 53 villages in the occupied Kherson region. In its regular briefing on the war in the south, Ukraine’s southern military command described the situation as tense and said Russia attacked along the front line on August 2. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register The steel-making city of Kryvyi Rih where Zelenskiy grew up is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the southern front. “(Russia) has started to create a strike group in the direction of Kryvyi Rih. It is also very likely that the enemy is preparing a hostile counterattack with the next plan to reach the administrative border of the Kherson region,” the southern military command said. Ukraine has been trying to increase pressure on Russian positions in the strategic Black Sea region of the Kherson and has used long-range weapons supplied by the West to strike Russian supply lines and ammunition dumps. Ukraine’s military said in a statement that Russian forces are searching basements in the area to convert them into bomb shelters to store military equipment. On Tuesday, Zelensky described the fighting in parts of the eastern front in the heavily industrialized Donbass as “simply hell” in his nightly address to the nation. Russia has not claimed significant territorial gains in its invasion since it claimed to have captured Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region about a month ago. But on Tuesday, Ukraine’s military command acknowledged that Russia had “partial success” in the “Donetsk-Pisky direction” around the Russian-held city of Donetsk and Russian-backed separatists. In its war update on Wednesday, Ukraine’s military command said its troops repelled attempts by Russian forces to advance in the direction of the town of Avdiivka, which is near Donetsk. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Aleksandar Vasovic. Written by Tom Balmforth. Editing by Angus MacSwan and Nick Macfie Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
