Russia's New Dnipro Fighting Force Highlights Heavy Losses: U.K.

Russian forces fighting in Moscow-occupied southern Ukraine have likely suffered "heavy losses," the British Defense Ministry has said, after the Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had traveled to the annexed Ukrainian territory.

On April 18, the Kremlin said Putin had met with military commanders in areas of Russian-controlled Ukraine, including the southern Kherson and eastern Luhansk regions. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the visit took place on April 17, according to Russian state media, dismissing reported inconsistencies in footage published of the visit and this claimed date.

In a press release, the Kremlin said the Russian leader had visited the "Dnipr Group of Forces" in the annexed Kherson region, using the Russian spelling to refer to Ukraine's Dnipro river, the British Defense Ministry noted on Thursday.

"This is one of the first references to the existence of a Dnipr Group of Forces (DGF)," the ministry said in its daily intelligence update. Russia's military uses this designation of a "group of forces" to specifically refer to a "large, task-organized operational formation," the ministry added.

"The existence of an apparently new DGF suggest that the original force organisation has evolved, probably due to heavy losses," the British defense ministry wrote on Twitter. However, Russia does not provide regular updates on Moscow's casualties.

This grouping of forces has likely been deployed to defend Russia's southwestern flank currently identified by the Dnipro river running through the Kherson region, the ministry said. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian defense ministry for comment via email.

Russia announced it was annexing Kherson and the southern Zaporizhzhia region, along with the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk areas, in September 2022. However, Moscow's forces do not fully control the territories, and a counteroffensive effort from the summer of 2022 saw Ukrainian forces retake the captured city of Kherson, which had fallen to Russian soldiers in the early days of the war.

Western analysts have reported in recent weeks that Russia has prepared defenses in southern Ukraine in anticipation of a spring counteroffensive by Kyiv's fighters.

On Wednesday, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank said Russian forces had continued to carry out defense operations in southern Ukraine, including Kherson. The think tank then cited Kherson Oblast occupation administration head, Vladimir Saldo, as saying on Tuesday that Russian forces had built defensive structures on the Dnipro's east bank in the Kherson region.

In an update on Thursday, Ukraine's General Staff of the Armed Forces said Russia had launched defensive operations on the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia axes over the previous 24 hours, shelling more than 35 settlements.

Ukraine's deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said on Wednesday that Ukraine's long-touted counteroffensives operations had already started, according to Ukrainian media.

"To talk narrowly about counterattack is incorrect," Maliar wrote on social media on Wednesday. "This is a huge set of actions and measures that are undertaken by the Armed Forces of Ukraine."