In its daily update on the war in Ukraine on Tuesday, Britain’s defence ministry said Russian forces had made only “marginal progress” in an attempt to encircle Avdiivka in recent days and had lost many armoured vehicles and tanks.
Russia’s 10th Tank Regiment, taking part in the Avdiivka operation, was dogged by problems of ill discipline and poor morale, and had “likely lost a large proportion of its tanks”, the ministry said.
In another sign of the pressure Moscow is facing, Russia said on Tuesday it had for the first time shot down a US-supplied GLSDB guided smart bomb fired by Ukrainian forces.
The Ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb, long sought by Kyiv to hit Russian command centres and supply lines, could double Ukraine’s battlefield firing range.
Separately, Ukrainian forces reported repelling 62 Russian assaults along the eastern front over the past 24 hours.
Reuters could not verify the battlefield reports.
Russian-installed officials in Donetsk city said Ukrainian forces killed two civilians late on Monday when they shelled an apartment building there. Reuters reporters saw rescuers combing through the rubble of the building, the lower part of which had collapsed, and one victim’s legs protruding from the debris.
There was no immediate comment from Ukrainian authorities.
TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, now into its 14th month, has been bogged down for months in eastern Ukraine.
In warnings to the West against arming Ukraine, Putin and other Russian officials increasingly play up the risks of nuclear weapons being used in the war. On Saturday, Putin said he had struck a deal to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighbouring Belarus, an ally of Moscow.
Belarus confirmed this on Tuesday, saying the decision was a response to Western pressure including what it said was a military build-up by NATO member states near its borders. Minsk’s foreign ministry said the nuclear plans did not contravene international non-proliferation agreements.
Ukraine and its Western allies have denounced the plan, which anti-nuclear campaigners warn will lower the threshold for using tactical short-range battlefield nuclear weapons.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Belarus would face further European sanctions as a result.
The war has devastated Ukrainian cities and towns, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and forced millions more to flee their homes.
US officials said Washington supports the establishment of a special tribunal on the crime of “aggression” against Ukraine, laying out for the first time how the United States would back Ukraine’s push for accountability over Russia’s invasion.
Moscow says what it calls a special military operation in Ukraine was necessary to protect Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine from persecution, and to prevent an aggressive West using Ukraine to threaten Russia.
Kyiv and Western countries say these are baseless pretexts for an imperial-style land grab in Ukraine, which was once part of the Soviet Union until its break-up in 1991.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
