Ukraine recaptures village as Russian forces hold other lines, fire on fleeing civilians elsewhere

KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's Military on Sunday reported recapturing a southeastern village as Russian forces claimed to repel multiple attacks in the area, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's top adviser said six people were injured after Moscow's troops opened fire at a boat evacuating people from Russian-occupied areas to Ukrainian-held territory along a flooded front line far to the south.

The battlefield showdown in the southeast and chaotic scenes from inundated southern Ukraine marked the latest upheaval and bloodshed in Russia's war in Ukraine, now in its 16th month.

Andriy Yermak, the president's chief of staff, wrote on his Telegram account that the injured were rushed to hospital in the southern city of Kherson, on the western bank of the swollen Dnieper River. An Associated Press team on site saw three ambulances drop off injured evacuees at a hospital, one of whom was splattered with blood and whisked by stretcher into the emergency room.

Many civilians have said Russian authorities in occupied areas were forcing would-be evacuees to present Russian passports before taking them to safety. Since then, many small boats have shuttled from Ukrainian-held areas on the west bank across the river — which has been flooded since a dam breach upstream on Tuesday — to fetch and ferry over desperate civilians stuck on rooftops, in attics and other islands of dry amid the deluge.

To the northeast, nearly half-way up the more than 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, Ukrainian forces said they drove out Russian fighters from the village of Blahodatne, in the partially occupied Donetsk region. Ukraine's 68th Separate Hunting Brigade posted a video on Facebook that showed soldiers installing a Ukrainian flag on a damaged building in the village.

The advance amounted to the latest indication that a highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive might be underway — even as officials in Kyiv stopped short of publicly acknowledging it.

Myroslav Semeniuk, spokesman for the brigade, told The Associated Press that an assault team captured six Russian troops after entering several buildings where some 60 soldiers were holed up. “The enemy keeps shelling us but this won’t stop us,” Semeniuk said. “The next village we plan to reclaim is Urozhayne. After that, (we’ll proceed) further south.”

While the recapture of Blahodatne pointed to a small Ukrainian advance, Western and Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly cautioned that efforts to expel Russian troops more broadly are expected take time. Russia has made much of how its troops have held their ground elsewhere.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday continued to insist that it was repelling Ukrainian attacks in the area. It said in a statement that Ukrainian attempts at offensive operations on the southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia axes of the frontline over the past 24 hours had been “unsuccessful.”

Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed official in the Zaporizhzhia region, insisted that Blahodatne and two other villages in the region were in a “gray area” in terms of who controls them. According to Rogov, Ukrainian forces briefly seized another village in the neighboring Donetsk region, but were swiftly routed by Russian troops.

"The situation is developing. Nothing extraordinary is happening,” he said in a Telegram post.

In his biggest signal yet that a renewed push to drive out Russian forces had begun, Zelenskyy said Saturday that “counteroffensive and defensive actions” were underway. He refused to disclose any details but asked to pass it on to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his top commanders were in a “positive” mindset as their troops engaged in intense fighting along the front line.

A day earlier, Putin asserted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had started, and said Ukrainian forces were taking “significant losses.”

Top Ukrainian authorities stopped short of announcing a full-blown counteroffensive was underway, though some Western analysts said fiercer fighting and reported use of reserve troops suggested it was.

In other developments:

Ukrhydroenergo, Ukraine’s hydropower generator, said Sunday that water levels on a reservoir above the ruptured Kakhovka dam continued to decline — at 9.35 meters (30 feet, 6 inches) on Sunday morning, marking a drop of more than seven meters since the dam break on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, below the dam, Kherson regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said water levels on the Ukrainian-held west bank were receding, even if more than 32 settlements remained flooded. He said conditions were worse on the Russian-occupied eastern bank, which sits at a lower elevation and where water levels were slower to drop back down.

Also Sunday, the Russian military accused Ukrainian forces of attacking — albeit unsuccessfully — one of its ships in the Black Sea.

According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, the attempted attack took place when six unmanned speedboats targeted Russia’s Priazovye reconnaissance vessel that was “monitoring the situation and ensuring security along the routes of the TurkStream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the southeastern part of the Black Sea.”

All the speedboats were destroyed by the Russian Military, and the ship didn’t sustain any damage, the ministry said. The claim could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian officials made no immediate comment.