Ukrainian army reports 'partial successes' in its counteroffensive

Kiev [Ukraine], October 8: The Ukrainian army says it is continuing to attack Russian troops on two important sections of the front in the east and south of the country with some success, the General Staff in Kiev announced in its situation report for Saturday morning.
South of the town of Bakhmut, there have been "partial successes" near the village of Andriyivka, the report said. While Bakhmut is still in Russian hands, the Ukrainians have recaptured a strategically important railway line south of it in recent weeks. They are now expanding their positions on the other side of the railway.
On the southern front in the Zaporizhzhya region, there have also been "partial successes" north of the villages of Kopani and Novoprokopivka, the report said.
In this region, Ukrainian troops have been fighting their way through heavily fortified Russian defence lines featuring minefields, tank traps and trenches for weeks.
The fighting near Kopani and Novoprokopivka indicates that the Ukrainians are widening their breach of the Russian defences. Military figures are often not independently verifiable. However, the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has also mentioned Ukrainian advances in its new report. But it said the Russian army had managed to exchange troop units on this section of the front, despite Ukrainian pressure.
Attacks by Russian ground troops were concentrated on the front sections of Kupyansk and Lyman in the east as well as Avdiivka and Maryinka near Donetsk, according to Ukrainian information.
However, they were repelled, according to the information. Along the almost 1,000-kilometre-long front, 120 Ukrainian villages were shelled by Russian artillery on Friday. Ukraine has been repelling the Russian invasion since February 2022.
Meanwhile, there were no military targets in the village that was hit by a Russian missile strike on Thursday, a top Ukrainian police official said, in what was one of the deadliest attacks against civilians since the conflict began and which the country's president called "inhuman" and "deliberate."
Moscow's forces targeted a cafe and a shop in Hroza, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, with what Ukrainian officials say was a powerful Iskander ballistic missile, killing at least 52 people, including a 6-year-old boy.
Scenes emerged of emergency workers wading through dense rubble in the aftermath of the strike - a scale of devastation not seen since a Russian attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk in early 2022 killed more than 60 people.
The death toll in such a small community of 330 people means one in every six residents was killed.
"All the people are local residents, all the people are civilians. Not a single military object, not a single military vehicle. All the dead and wounded people are civilians," Sergey Bolvinov, the chief investigator with Kharkiv's regional police, told CNN in Hroza.
Investigators and forensic teams worked through the night sifting through the rubble and trying to count and identify the bodies, many of which were in bad condition due to the force of the blast, according to a CNN team at the scene.
A local man whose wife died in the strike could be seen crouching over her body, too shaken to speak and unable to leave her side. He later helped emergency services lift her body onto a truck to be taken away.
Bolvinov said the bodies of 35 victims have been identified so far.
Source: Qatar Tribune