A fierce information war erupted on Monday over whether fighting along the frontline in Ukraine was the long-awaited counter-offensive by Kyiv’s army.
The Russian ministry of defence claimed to have thwarted an attempted major advance.
But a Ukrainian minister dismissed the statement as an attempt by Moscow to “divert attention from the defeat in the Bakhmut direction” where Russian troops were reportedly losing ground.
Moscow said it had stopped a major Ukrainian assault involving six mechanised and two tank battalions in the south of Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
In a post on the Telegram messaging app, deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said Ukrainian forces were “shifting to offensive actions” in some areas along the front line but appeared to play down suggestions that this was part of a major operation.
“Why are the Russians actively releasing information about a counteroffensive? Because they need to divert attention from the defeat in the Bakhmut direction,” she wrote.
Vladimir Putin’s Wagner Group ‘private army” captured Bakhmut last month after the longest battle of the war and handed its positions there to regular Russian troops.
Since then, Ukraine has continued to attack areas north and south of the city.
Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Monday that Kyiv’s troops had retaken part of a village near the ruined city.
Ms Maliar said the area around Bakhmut remained the “epicentre” of fighting and that the Ukrainian military was “moving along a fairly wide front”.
Earlier, Putin’s military chiefs claimed on Monday that their forces had thwarted a major Ukrainian offensive in the south eastern province of Donetsk.
The Russian defence ministry also alleged that hundreds of Ukrainian troops had been killed in the fighting at five points along the front line.
But the claims from Moscow could not be independently verified and need to be treated with caution amid the information battle over Putin’s conflict, as they may well be exaggerated.
Other reports, including one from a Russian-backed militia leader in Ukraine, said Kyiv forces had made some gains, though, they had also suffered losses.
It was also not clear if the Ukrainian advances, whether repelled or not, were part of the widely expected major counter-offensive.
But military expert Professor Michael Clarke, former head of the Royal United Services Institute, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning:
“I’ve been looking a material in the last hour.
“There is something going on in Soledar, north of Bakhmut, in Vuhledar, south of Bakhmut.....
“I think today, 4th of June will go down as the day when the Ukrainians began their ground operation.”
Ukraine is adopting a policy of silence over the counter-offensive and the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, on Monday did not mention it.
But he did say that Ukrainian forces continued “moving forward” near Bakhmut, the town in eastern Ukraine seized by Putin’s Wagner Group “private army” after the fiercest fighting in Europe since the Second World War.
Colonel General Syrskyi said that Ukrainian forces were successful in destroying a Russian position near the city.
“We continue moving forward,” he said on the Telegram messaging app.
The Russian defence ministry claimed its forces killed 250 Ukrainian troops as well as destroying 16 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 21 armoured combat vehicles in repelling the alleged major offensive.
Moscow added that Kyiv forces had attacked with six mechanised and two tank battalions in southern Donetsk, where Moscow has long suspected Ukraine would seek to drive a wedge through Russian-controlled territory.
“On the morning of June 4, the enemy launched a large-scale offensive in five sectors of the front in the South Donetsk direction,” the defence ministry said in a statement posted on Telegram at 1:30 a.m. Moscow time (2230 GMT).
“The enemy’s goal was to break through our defences in the most vulnerable, in its opinion, sector of the front,” it said. “The enemy did not achieve its tasks, it had no success.”
The daily report from Ukraine’s General Staff said only that there were 29 combat clashes in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov published a cryptic message on Twitter on Sunday, quoting Depeche Mode’s track “Enjoy the Silence”.
“Words are very unnecessary They can only do harm,” his tweet said.
Russia’s defence ministry released video of what it said showed several Ukrainian armoured vehicles in a field blowing up after being hit.
Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who is in charge of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, was in the area of the Ukrainian attack, the ministry said.
Some prominent Russian military bloggers, including Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name War Gonzo, reported heavy fighting early on Monday in areas controlled by Russia.
Pegov said that Ukrainian forces are attacking near Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region.
“There is a tough fight going on.”
Other Russian military bloggers reported also heavy fighting on Monday morning near Bakhmut, nearby Soledar and Vuhledar in the Donetsk region.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has braced his country, and the West, for difficulties in achieving any swift success in the counter-offensive.
Western officials say Russia has built up potentially “formidable defences”, and whether they hold could depend on the morale of Russian troops.
Mr Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Saturday that he was ready to launch the counter-offensive but tempered a forecast of success with a warning that it could take some time and come at a heavy cost.
“I don’t know how long it will take,” he told The Journal. “To be honest, it can go a variety of ways, completely different. But we are going to do it, and we are ready.”
After seeking tens of billions of dollars of Western weapons to fight Russian forces, the success or failure of the counter-offensive is likely to influence the shape of future Western diplomatic and military support for Ukraine.
Ukraine has in recent weeks sought to weaken Russian positions but its specific plans have been shrouded in secrecy as it seeks to strike yet another blow against the much larger military of Russia.
Moscow was last month struck by drones which Russia said was a Ukrainian terrorist attack while pro-Ukrainian forces have repeatedly crossed into Russia proper in recent days in the Belgorod region.
After a two-month lull, Russia has launched hundreds of drones and missiles on Ukraine since early May, chiefly on Kyiv, with Ukraine saying the targets were its military and critical infrastructure facilities.
Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24 last year in what the Kremlin expected to be swift operation but its forces suffered a series of defeats and had to move back and regroup in swathes of eastern Ukraine.
Russia now controls at least 18 per cent of what is internationally recognised to be Ukrainian territory, and has claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory.
For months, tens of thousands of Russian troops have been digging in along a front line which stretches for around 600 miles, bracing for a Ukrainian attack which is expected to try to cut Russia’s so-called land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Ukraine says it will not rest until it has ejected every last Russian soldier from its territory.
