In spite of Moscow's weakening hold in the south, where a Russian-installed official has urged residents to leave a region Russia claims to have annexed, Russian-backed forces have made some progress in eastern Ukraine, Britain reported on Friday.

The villages of Optyine and Ivangrad, south of the hotly contested town of Bakhmut, were taken by forces led by the private Russian military company Wagner Group, according to a British intelligence update. This was the first such advance in more than three months.

Since early July, "few, if any, other settlements have been taken by regular Russian or separatist forces," according to the daily update from London, which usually concentrates on Ukrainian military victories.

In late August, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive against Russian forces that had been occupying the nation since the beginning of their invasion in February. This effort forced the Russians out of the northeast and put them under intense pressure in the south.

Kherson, one of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces that Russia claims to have annexated recently, is the current focus of its attention and is probably the most strategically significant.

A day after a Russian-installed official advised all residents of the region to leave, especially those near Kherson city, the TASS news agency in Russia reported that evacuees from the Kherson region were expected to start arriving in Russia on Friday.

As Ukrainian forces advance, some people in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine have fled to Russia, while others claim to have been forced to do so, and still others have fled westward to areas of their country under Ukrainian control.

STRATEGIC TARGET


A flight of civilians from Kherson would be a blow to Russia's claim, made last month, that it had incorporated a region the size of Portugal into Russia and annexated about 15% of Ukraine's territory.

The only significant city that Russia has completely taken over since its invasion in February is Kherson. It also holds control of the mouth of the Dnipro river, which divides Ukraine and is the only land route to the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.

With the aim of cutting off Russian troops' supply routes and river crossings, Ukrainian forces have made their largest southward advance since the war's start by piercing Russia's front lines in the area.

The eastern Donetsk region, which includes Optyine and Ivangrad, and 75 settlements in the Kherson region were among the 600 settlements that Ukraine's armed forces retook in the previous month.

The Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories noted on its website that "the area of liberated Ukrainian territories has increased significantly."


The battlefield reports could not immediately be verified by Reuters.

Moscow refers to the conflict, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of cities, towns, and villages, as a "special military operation" to demilitarize a nation whose moves toward the West pose a threat to Russia's own security. According to Kiev and its allies in the West, it is an unprovoked war of conquest.

According to the British report, severe munitions and manpower shortages, as well as Ukrainian forces on the northern and southern ends of the front line, continue to jeopardize Moscow's overall military campaign in Ukraine.

Russia claimed to be aiming for Bakhmut in an effort to take control of the Kramatorsk-Solviansk urban area in the eastern Donetsk region, which it claimed to have annexed despite not having complete control over.

In a late-night video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the fighting as "brutal."

Additionally, he criticized the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for doing nothing to protect the rights of Ukrainian prisoners of war and pleaded with it to send a mission to a camp in the country's eastern, Russian-occupied region.

He claimed that no one had yet visited Olenivka, a notorious camp in eastern Ukraine where dozens of Ukrainian POWs perished in an explosion and fire in July. This was the latest in a string of criticisms from Ukraine directed at the ICRC.

Along with the annexation, Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken additional actions to escalate the conflict in response to the battlefield setbacks, including mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists and threatening to use nuclear weapons.

Russia launched its largest airstrikes since the war began this week, launching over 100 cruise missiles primarily at Ukraine's heating and electricity infrastructure.

Since then, authorities in the bordering Russian region of Belgorod have charged Ukraine with attacking an apartment building in the region's capital and aiming for its power supplies. According to Ukraine, a Russian missile that erred caused damage to the block.

A missile fragment that fell nearby caused train operations to be suspended close to Novyi Oskol, a town of about 18,000 people located about 90 kilometers (56 miles) north of the border, according to Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor of Belgorod.

Putin claimed that the Russian attacks on Ukraine were in retaliation for a blast that damaged Russia's bridge to Crimea on Saturday.

According to a Friday document posted on the Russian government's website, damage to the bridge, a centerpiece of Putin's rule, won't be fixed until next summer.