The Russian Defense Ministry announced today, Sunday, a huge toll of the Ukrainian army's losses during the 6-month war, at a time when President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the mandatory evacuation of residents of a strategic region in the east of the country.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said that his country's forces had destroyed 4,195 tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the Ukrainian army since the start of the war on February 24.
He explained that since the beginning of the war, 261 fighters, 145 helicopters, and 1,649 drones have been shot down, in addition to the destruction of 361 air defense systems, 773 missile launchers, 3,220 artillery, and 4,619 special military vehicles.
On February 24, Russia launched an attack on Ukraine, followed by international rejection and severe economic sanctions against Moscow, which stipulate to end its operation that Kyiv abandon plans to join military entities and remain neutral, which the latter considers an "interference" in its sovereignty.
The Russian outcome comes at a time when Moscow said that a drone attack targeted this morning the headquarters of its fleet in the Black Sea in the Crimea, and accused Ukraine of carrying it out, which the latter denied.
The press office of the Black Sea Fleet said that a hand-made drone carrying an explosive device bombed the headquarters of the fleet in the city of Sevastopol in the Crimea, adding that the explosion was not strong and injured 5 people after flying glass shards.
Before that, Mikhail Razvogaev, the governor of Simferopol (the capital of Crimea), accused what he described as Ukrainian nationalists of carrying out the attack with the aim of disturbing the celebrations in Russia for Naval Day.
He added that all events commemorating the Navy Day were canceled in Crimea (annexed by Russia in 2014) - including in Sevastopol - for security reasons, noting that the State Security Service is investigating the incident.
In Moscow, Vladimir Jabarov, First Deputy Chairman of the International Relations Committee of the Russian Federation Council called for a response to what happened in Sevastopol by targeting decision-making centers in Kyiv.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian army denied the Russian accusations, and Sergey Prachuk, a spokesman for the Military Regional Command in Odessa, said that accusing the Ukrainian army of targeting the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea constitutes a frank provocation and a follow-up to Russia's continued policy of lies, as he put it.
"The liberation of the occupied Ukrainian Crimea will happen in another, more effective way," Brachuk added.
The attack was announced hours before the start of celebrations in Russia marking the anniversary of the founding of its war fleet, as Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the largest military parade of the Russian Navy in St. Petersburg.
In the field developments, the Ukrainian President announced yesterday, Saturday, a mandatory evacuation of residents from Donetsk province in the eastern Donbass region due to what he described as Russian terrorism, in reference to Ukrainian accusations of Russian forces destroying infrastructure and bombing civilians in the region.
"Hundreds of thousands of people and children are still in the areas of heavy fighting in the Donetsk region (...), the more people left the Donetsk region, the less the number of people killed by the Russian army," Zelensky said, stressing that a government decision was taken on a "forced evacuation" of the region.
And Irina Vereshchuk, the First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, announced the mandatory evacuation of all residents of Donetsk, which together with Lugansk makes up the Donbass region, and justified the decision by the destroyed gas networks and the absence of heating in the coming winter in the region, and the Ukrainian authorities estimate the number of residents remaining in Donetsk at about 200 thousand people.
Meanwhile, Oleksiy Aristovich, an advisor to the Ukrainian president, said he expected that Russian forces would be ready for a new phase of escalation in the south of the country.
Aristovich added that the Russian army has moved large sections of its forces from northeastern Ukraine to the south.
He warned that the southern regions will witness the most dangerous stage in the middle of next August, coinciding with the actual start of the implementation of the Ukrainian grain agreement and the launch of the first ships from the ports of Odessa (south) towards Istanbul.
Currently, fierce battles are taking place between Russian forces and the separatists of Lugansk and Donetsk and Ukrainian forces on the banks of the Dnipro River, starting from Zaporozhye through the Mykolaiv province and ending with the Kherson province, in which Ukrainian forces are trying to isolate the Russian forces west of the Dnipro River from their supplies coming from the Crimea.
Yesterday, Saturday, the two sides talked about the killing of large numbers of soldiers and the destruction of military sites in Kherson and Donetsk, while parts of Mykolaiv were subjected to Russian shelling described as the most violent since the war began.
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