Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday night that the Ukrainian army had retaken 6,000 square kilometres of land in the east and south since the start of September, as cited by the Ukrainska Pravda website.
On Tuesday, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar announced that Ukrainian forces had liberated 3,800 square kilometres of the Kharkiv region, as part of the continuing counteroffensive, the Kyiv Indpendent reported.
According to Poland’s niezalezna.pl website, there has been growing evidence that the Russians are frequently fleeing the battlefield, and now also mounting reports that many Russian soldiers are surrendering.
“The number of Russian servicemen who have been taken prisoner during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the eastern Kharkiv region runs into the thousands,” the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reported on Tuesday, as quoted by niezalezna.pl.
UNIAN also noted that Russian POWs include high-ranking officers, according to niezalezna.pl.
‘We have nowhere to keep all the POWs’
The Polish website said that so far, the government in Kyiv hadn’t produced official figures on the number of Russian troops taken prisoner during the counter-offensive.
It quoted Oleksii Arestovych, an aide to President Zelensky, as saying that the number of prisoners was spiralling.
“We have nowhere to keep all the POWs,” the Ukrainian official said, according to niezalezna.pl.
Tuesday is day 202 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Source: niezalezna.pl, ukrinform.net