Ukrainian officials have reported fierce fighting on the front lines after their military launched its long-anticipated counteroffensive. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “very tough battles” were raging in the eastern Donetsk region and that Ukrainian forces were seeing “step-by-step” results.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday offered his first remarks acknowledging the counteroffensive, telling reporters that the Kremlin could say with “absolute certainty” that the campaign had begun but that Ukraine had not achieved its goals.
Ukraine has not made an official announcement on the counteroffensive — and has previously cautioned that no single action would mark the start of the campaign. However, Ukrainian troops intensified strikes in the southeast this week, according to four service members, The Washington Post reported. The offensive is expected to unfold over months and serve as a test of months-long efforts by the United States and Ukraine’s other Western backers to train its forces and equip them with increasingly sophisticated weapons.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
The war has exacted a massive toll: As many as 120,000 Ukrainian troops and 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Thousands of civilians also have died, many under flattened buildings, others shot and buried in mass graves. Whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble.
In the past year, the war has shifted from a fast-moving, multipronged invasion to a battle of attrition concentrated along hundreds of miles of front lines. Both countries have seen their economies devastated, Ukraine’s most acutely but Russia’s, too, from the cost of military mobilizations and the weight of Western sanctions.
Ben Brasch, Greg Miller and Alex Hortan contributed to this report.
