Aug 3 (Reuters) - Russian forces have made no headway along the front lines, but are entrenched in heavily mined areas they control, making it difficult for Ukrainian troops to move east and south, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
Russian accounts of the fighting on the frontline said 12 Ukrainian attacks had been repelled in Donetsk region - a focal point of Russian advances for months.
Much of Russian military activity focused on air attacks that damaged grain infrastructure in Ukraine's Danube port of Izmail. Russia's Defence Ministry also said its forces had destroyed a Ukrainian naval drone that tried to attack a Russian warship escorting a civilian vessel in the Black Sea.
Ukrainian forces launched a drive in June to retake occupied areas and have been pressing southward toward the Sea of Azov to sever a land bridge between occupied eastern Ukraine and the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.
Kyiv also says it has retaken areas near Bakhmut, an eastern city seized by Russian forces in May after months of battles.
Deputy Ukrainian Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces had "tried quite persistently to halt our advance in the Bakhmut sector. Without success."
Russian forces, she wrote on the Telegram messaging app, were beefing up reserves and equipment in three areas further north, where heavy fighting has also been reported in recent weeks.
Oleksiy Danilov, the Secretary of Ukraine's Security Council, said Russian forces had ample time in months of occupation to prepare defences and lay extensive minefields.
"The enemy has prepared very thoroughly for these events," he told national television. "The number of mines on the territory that our troops have retaken is utterly mad. On average, there are three, four, five mines per square metre."Danilov restated assertions by President Volodymyr Zeleskiy that the advances, while slower than hoped, could not be rushed as human lives were at stake.
"No one can set deadlines for us, except ourselves... there is no fixed schedule," he said. "I have never used the term counter-offensive. There are military operations and they are complex difficult and depend on many factors."
Russia's Defence Minister, in its account of the fighting,
said Ukrainian forces had made unsuccessful attempts to advance in several sectors in both southern and northern parts of Donetsk region.
It also said Russian forces had launched strikes on towns around Bakhmut, including Kurdyumovka on the city's southern fringes and Chasiv Yar, the first major town to the west.
Members of a mortar team from the 24th Mechanized Brigade fire on a Russian position in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, on July 23, 2023. (Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — The first several weeks of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive have not been kind to the Ukrainian troops who were trained and armed by the United States and its allies.
Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether.
Now the Western-trained Ukrainian brigades are trying to turn things around, U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire. A troop surge is underway in the country’s south, with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mostly small-scale attacks to punch through Russian lines.
But early results have been mixed. While Ukrainian troops have retaken a few villages, they have yet to make the kinds of sweeping gains that characterized their successes in the strategically important cities of Kherson and Kharkiv last fall. The complicated training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians scant solace in the face of barrage after barrage of Russian artillery.
Ukraine’s decision to change tactics is a clear signal that NATO’s hopes for large advances made by Ukrainian formations armed with new weapons, new training and an injection of artillery ammunition have failed to materialize, at least for now.
It raises questions about the quality of the training the Ukrainians received from the West and about whether tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nearly $44 billion worth from the Biden administration, have been successful in transforming the Ukrainian military into a NATO-standard fighting force.
“The counteroffensive itself hasn’t failed; it will drag on for several months into the fall,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently visited the front lines. “Arguably, the problem was in the assumption that with a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be converted into fighting more the way American forces might fight, leading the assault against a well-prepared Russian defense, rather than helping Ukrainians fight more the best way they know how.”
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has increasingly signaled that his strategy is to wait out Ukraine and its allies and win the war by exhausting them. American officials are worried that Ukraine’s return to its old tactics risks that it will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could play into Putin’s hands and put Ukraine at a disadvantage in a war of attrition.
Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach. While the Russians have a rigidly centralized command structure, the Americans taught the Ukrainians to empower senior enlisted soldiers to make quick decisions on the battlefield and to deploy combined arms tactics — synchronized attacks by infantry, armor and artillery forces.
Western officials championed that approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition, which threatens to deplete Ukraine’s ammunition stocks.
Much of the training involved teaching Ukrainian troops how to go on the offensive rather than stay on defense. For years, Ukrainian troops had worked on defensive tactics as Russian-backed separatists launched attacks in eastern Ukraine. When Moscow began its full-scale invasion last year, Ukrainian troops put their defensive operations into play, denying Russia the swift victory it had anticipated.
The effort to take back their own territory “is requiring them to fight in different ways,” Colin H. Kahl, who recently stepped down as the Pentagon’s top policy official, said last month.
But the Western-trained brigades received only four to six weeks of combined arms training, and units made several mistakes at the start of the counteroffensive in early June that set them back, according to U.S. officials and analysts who recently visited the front lines and spoke to Ukrainian troops and commanders.
Some units failed to follow cleared paths and ran into mines. When a unit delayed a nighttime attack, an accompanying artillery bombardment to cover its advance went ahead as scheduled, tipping off the Russians.
In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20% of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The toll included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.
Military experts said that using newly learned tactics for the first time was always going to be hard, especially given that the Russian response was to assume a defensive crouch and fire massive barrages of artillery.
“They were given a tall order,” said Rob Lee, a Russian military specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a former U.S. Marine officer, who has also traveled to the front lines. “They had a short amount of time to train on new equipment and to develop unit cohesion, and then they were thrown into one of the most difficult combat situations. They were put in an incredibly tough position.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine acknowledged in late July that his country’s counteroffensive against dug-in Russian troops was advancing more slowly than expected.
“We did have plans to start it in the spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades — I mean, properly trained in these weapons,” Zelenskyy said via video link at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual national-security conference.
He added that “because we started it a bit late,” Russia had “time to mine all of our lands and build several lines of defense.”
Ukraine may well return to the American way of warfare if it breaks through dug-in Russian defenses, some military experts said. But offense is harder than defense, as Russia demonstrated last year when it abandoned its initial plans to advance to Kyiv.
“I do not think they’re abandoning combined arms tactics,” Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star Air Force general who was NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, said in an interview. “If they were to get through the first, second or third lines of defense, I think you’re going to see the definition of combined arms.”
Speaking at the Aspen forum, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said, “Ukraine has a substantial amount of combat power that it has not yet committed to the fight, and it is trying to choose its moment to commit that combat power to the fight when it will have the maximum impact on the battlefield.”
That moment appeared to come last week when Ukraine significantly ratcheted up its counteroffensive with two southward thrusts apparently aimed at cities in the Zaporizhzhia region: Melitopol, near the Sea of Azov, and Berdiansk, to the east on the Azov coast. In both cases, the Ukrainians have advanced only a few miles and have dozens more to go.
But analysts question whether this second wave, relying on attacks by smaller units, will generate enough combat power and momentum to allow Ukrainian troops to push through Russian defenses.
Gian Luca Capovin and Alexander Stronell, analysts with the British security intelligence firm Janes, said that the small-unit attack strategy “is extremely likely to result in mass casualties, equipment loss and minimal territorial gains” for Ukraine.
U.S. officials said, however, the surge in Ukrainian forces in the past week came at a time when the Ukrainians were clearing paths through some of the Russian defenses and beginning to wear down Russian troops and artillery.
A Western official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details and intelligence assessments, said the Russians were stretched and still experiencing problems with logistics, supply, personnel and weapons.
Breedlove concurred and said he still expected the Ukrainian counteroffensive to put Russia at a disadvantage.
“The Ukrainians are in a place now where they understand how they want to employ their forces,” he said. “And we’re starting to see the Russians move backwards.”
NEW YORK (AP) — There could be a new contender for heaviest animal to ever live. While today’s blue whale has long held the title, scientists have dug up fossils from an ancient giant that could tip the scales.
Researchers described the species — named Perucetus colossus, or “the colossal whale from Peru” — in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Each vertebra weighs over 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and its ribs measure nearly 5 feet (1.4 meters) long.
“It’s just exciting to see such a giant animal that’s so different from anything we know,” said Hans Thewissen, a paleontologist at Northeast Ohio Medical University who had no role in the research.
The bones were discovered more than a decade ago by Mario Urbina from the University of San Marcos’ Natural History Museum in Lima. An international team spent years digging them out from the side of a steep, rocky slope in the Ica desert, a region in Peru that was once underwater and is known for its rich marine fossils. The results: 13 vertebrae from the whale’s backbone, four ribs and a hip bone.
The massive fossils, which are 39 million years old, “are unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” said study author Alberto Collareta, a paleontologist at Italy’s University of Pisa.
After the excavations, the researchers used 3D scanners to study the surface of the bones and drilled into them to peek inside. They used the huge — but incomplete — skeleton to estimate the whale’s size and weight, using modern marine mammals for comparison, said study author Eli Amson, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.
They calculated that the ancient giant weighed somewhere between 94 and 375 tons (85 and 340 metric tons). The biggest blue whales found have been within that range — at around 200 tons (180 metric tons).
Its body stretched to around 66 feet (20 meters) long. Blue whales can be longer — with some growing to more than 100 feet (30 meters) in length.
This means the newly discovered whale was “possibly the heaviest animal ever,” Collareta said, but “it was most likely not the longest animal ever.”
It weighs more in part because its bones are much denser and heavier than a blue whale’s, Amson explained.
Those super-dense bones suggest that the whale may have spent its time in shallow, coastal waters, the authors said. Other coastal dwellers, like manatees, have heavy bones to help them stay close to the seafloor.
Without the skull, it’s hard to know what the whale was eating to sustain such a huge body, Amson said.
It’s possible that P. colossus was scavenging for food along the seafloor, researchers said, or eating up tons of krill and other tiny sea creatures in the water.
But “I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing actually fed in a totally different way that we would never imagine,” Thewissen added.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Kyiv says aim is to intimidate shippers considering return
Moscow pulled out of grain deal in mid-July
KYIV, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Russia attacked Ukraine's main inland port across the Danube River from Romania on Wednesday, sending global food prices higher as it ramps up its use of force to prevent Ukraine from exporting grain.
The attacks destroyed buildings in the port of Izmail and halted ships in their tracks as they prepared to arrive there to load up with Ukrainian grain in defiance of a de-facto blockade Russia reimposed in mid-July.
Commercial ship tracking data showed dozens of international ships halting and dropping anchor at the mouth of the Danube, many of them registered to arrive in Izmail from the Black Sea in an apparent bid to open a breach in Russia's blockade.
The port, across the river from NATO-member Romania, is the main alternative route out of Ukraine for grain exports, since Russia's blockade halted traffic at Ukraine's Black Sea ports in mid-July.
Video released by the Ukrainian authorities showed firefighters on ladders battling a huge blaze several stories high in a building covered with broken windows. Several other large buildings were in ruins, and grain spilled out of at least two wrecked silos.
Two industry sources told Reuters operations at the port were suspended. Seaport authority head Yuriy Lytvyn said on Facebook that repair work had already begun and the port infrastucture continued to operate.
There were no reports of casualties, Odesa region governor Oleh Kiper wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
"Russian terrorists have once again attacked ports, grain, global food security," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram.
Chicago wheat prices rose by nearly 5% following the attack and were still up 1.2% at $6.60 a bushel by 1119 GMT due to concern about a hit to global supplies from driving Ukraine, one of the world's top exporters, off the market.
Russia has attacked Ukrainian agricultural and port infrastructure for more than two weeks, since refusing to extend an agreement that had lifted its war-time blockade of Ukrainian ports last year.
PUTIN-ERDOGAN TALKS
President Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone to the grain export deal's sponsor, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
The Kremlin said Putin reiterated Russia's condition for rejoining the grain deal: that a parallel deal improving terms for its own food and fertiliser exports be implemented. Those exports are already exempt from sanctions, which the West says Moscow aims to undermine by threatening the global food supply.
Erdogan's office said he and Putin agreed that the Russian leader would soon visit Turkey. Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has made no official visits abroad this year, and has left former Soviet territory only once since launching his invasion - a day trip to Tehran more than a year ago. Erdogan has long said he hopes to host Putin and convince him to rejoin the grain deal.
Moscow has described its recent attacks on Ukraine's grain infrastructure as retaliation for a Ukrainian strike on a bridge to Crimea, used to supply its troops in southern Ukraine.
U.S. ambassador Bridget Brink condemned the attacks in a statement, listing recent Russian targets: "Homes. Ports. Grain silos. Historic buildings. Men. Women. Children.
"Round-the-clock and intensifying Russian strikes on Kryvyi Rih, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson make it clear once again Russia has no desire for peace, no thought for civilian safety, and no regard for people around the world who rely on food from Ukraine."
Kyiv says the goal of the strikes is to reimpose Russia's blockade by persuading shippers and their insurance companies that Ukrainian ports are unsafe to resume exports.
"It is the enemy's priority to convince the international community and shipowners in particular that ... navigation in the direction of Ukrainian-controlled ports is dangerous," said Natalia Humeniuk, military spokesperson in southern Ukraine.
Producers in Ukraine are already feeling the impact. Kees Huizinga, a farmer in Ukraine's central Cherkasy region told Reuters: "Because of the shelling a direct consequence to our farm is that we can not deliver 700 tons of contracted barley which we were supposed to deliver today".
Ukraine's Danube river ports such as Izmail accounted for around a quarter of grain exports before Russia pulled out of the Black Sea deal, and have since become the main remaining route out, with grain loaded onto barges and shipped to Romania's Black Sea port of Constanta for shipment onwards.
Kyiv's goal is for international ships to go straight there and load up directly and on Sunday, Ukrainian media reported several foreign cargo ships had arrived at Izmail from the Black Sea, for the first time since the expiry of the grain deal.
The United Nations has warned of a potential food crisis and hunger in the world's poorest countries as a result of Russia's decision to abandon the deal, brokered by the U.N. and Turkey.
Moscow says it will treat ships heading to Ukrainian seaports as potential military targets.
Ukrainian officials have said Moscow has hit 26 port facilities, five civilian vessels and 180,000 tonnes of grain in nine days of strikes since quitting the grain deal.
Ukraine's Air Force reported that Russia also launched a drone attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight. Air defence shot down 23 drones, but debris from downed drones damaged several buildings in the capital and the region. No casualties were initially reported.
Writing by Pavel Polityuk and Peter Graff; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Tom Hogue, Simon Cameron-Moore, Philippa Fletcher
ZHUZHOU, Hebei -- China's capital has recorded its heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years over the past few days after being deluged with heavy rains from the remnants of Typhoon Doksuri.
The city recorded 744.8 millimeters (29.3 inches) of rain between Saturday and Wednesday morning, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau said Wednesday.
Beijing and the surrounding province of Hebei have been hit by severe flooding because of the record rainfall, with waters rising to dangerous levels. The rain destroyed roads and knocked out power and even pipes carrying drinking water. It flooded rivers surrounding the capital, leaving cars waterlogged, while lifting others onto bridges meant for pedestrians.
Among the hardest hit areas is Zhuozhou, a small city in Hebei province that borders Beijing's southwest. On Tuesday night, police there issued a plea on social media for lights to assist with rescue work.
It's unknown how many people are trapped in flood-stricken areas in the city and surrounding villages.
On Wednesday, waters in Gu'an county in Hebei, which borders Zhuozhou, reached as high as halfway up a pole where a surveillance camera was installed.
Gu'an county resident Liu Jiwen, 58, was evacuated from his village on Tuesday night. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s natural disaster,” he said.
Two other people were trying to pass through the flooded areas to rescue a relative trapped in a nearby village.
Nearly 850,000 people have been relocated, local authorities in Hebei province said.
On Wednesday, the number of confirmed deaths from the torrential rains around Beijing rose to 21 after the body of a rescuer was recovered. Wang Hong-chun, 41, was with other rescuers in a rubber boat when it flipped over in a rapidly flowing river. Four of her teammates survived.
At least 26 people remain missing from the rains.
The previous record for rainfall was in 1891, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau said Wednesday, when the city received 609 millimeters (24 inches) of rain. The earliest precise measurements made by machines are from 1883.
The record rainfall from Typhoon Doksuri may not be the last. Typhoon Khanun, which was lashing Japan on Wednesday, is expected to head toward China later this week. The powerful storm, with surface winds of up to 180 kph (111 mph), may also hit Taiwan before it reaches China.
Thousands of people were evacuated to shelters in schools and other public buildings in suburban Beijing and in nearby cities. The central government is disbursing 44 million yuan ($6.1 million) for disaster relief in affected provinces.
The severity of the flooding took the Chinese capital by surprise. Beijing usually has dry summers but had a stretch of record-breaking heat this year.
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Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Associated Press news assistant Caroline Chen contributed to this report.
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WARSAW, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Poland said on Tuesday it was rushing troops to its eastern border after accusing Belarus, Russia's closest ally, of violating its airspace with military helicopters.
The Belarusian military denied any such violation and accused NATO member Poland, one of Ukraine's most fervent backers in its conflict with Russia, of making up the accusation to justify a buildup of its troops.
Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko had earlier taunted Poland over the presence of Russian Wagner mercenaries near their joint border.
Poland's Defence Ministry said it was sending "additional forces and resources, including combat helicopters". It said it had informed NATO of the border violation and Belarus' charge d'affaires had been summoned to provide an explanation.
The Polish military initially denied any border violation had occurred but later, after consultations, said the intrusion took place "at a very low height, hard to intercept by radar".
Belarus' defence ministry, writing on Telegram, said Warsaw had changed its mind about the incident "apparently after consulting its overseas masters".
"This statement was not backed up by data from Poland," it said. "The Belarusian Defence Ministry views it in the manner of an 'old wives' tale' and notes there were no border violations by Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters."
Residents of areas near the eastern Polish city of Bialowieza, close to the Belarus border, shared accounts on social media of what they said were border violations before the defence minister issued its statement.
HISTORY OF ANIMOSITY
Belarus has allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to use its territory as a launch pad for the Ukraine invasion, but Lukashenko has not committed his own troops to the war.
The ex-Soviet state has a long history of animosity with Poland, as does Russia.
Last week, Putin accused Poland of harbouring territorial ambitions on Belarus and said it would consider any attack on its neighbour as an attack on itself.
Earlier on Tuesday, Lukashenko mockingly told Poland it should thank him for keeping in check Wagner mercenaries now stationed in Belarus after an abortive mutiny against the Kremlin last month.
An unspecified number of the Wagner fighters have since moved to Belarus and begun training Lukashenko's army. Poland had already started moving more than 1,000 of its own troops closer to the border.
Lukashenko joked at a meeting with Putin last month that some of the fighters were keen to press into Poland and "go on a trip to Warsaw and Rzeszow".
State news agency Belta quoted him on Tuesday as saying that the Poles "should pray that we're holding onto (the Wagner fighters) and providing for them. Otherwise, without us, they would have seeped through and smashed up Rzeszow and Warsaw in no small way. So they shouldn't reproach me, they should say thank you."
Rzeszow is a city near the Ukrainian border.
On Saturday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said a group of 100 Wagner fighters had moved closer to the Belarusian city of Grodno near the Polish border, describing the situation as "increasingly dangerous".
Reporting by Mark Trevelyan, Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska, Max Rodionov and Ron Popeski, Editing by Gareth Jones and Bill Berkrot
Agnieszka is a Senior Central and Eastern Europe correspondent based in Warsaw, Poland. She reports on topics ranging from migration and defence to far right. Before joining Reuters in June 2022, she was based in Uzbekistan, where she focused on Central Asia and Afghanistan, but her reporting took her to various countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Her articles appeared in Al Jazeera English, Associated Press, Foreign Policy, the Guardian and the Diplomat. Contact: +48604243669
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