Ukraine Claims Another Village as Russian Tank Losses Mount

Ukraine has taken control of another settlement along the front line with Russia, according to Kyiv, as the Ukrainian government said Russia has lost more than 30 tanks in under a week.

"Defense forces returned Rivnopil under our control," Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar wrote on Telegram on Monday.

Rivnopil is a village in southeastern Ukraine, close to the border between the contested Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukraine's long-touted counteroffensive, which Russia has said got underway in early June, has focused on these two regions, which Moscow has claimed as annexed.

This latest announcement from Kyiv comes after Russia was shaken by a mutiny led by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, the consequences of which are still being assessed.

Earlier in June, Ukraine said it had seized control of eight settlements in the two regions. Rivnopil is not far from several of these villages, such as Storozheve and Makarivka.

Newsweek could not independently verify battlefield claims and has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

In an earlier post to social media on Monday, Maliar said Ukrainian forces had taken back 130 square kilometers (about 50 square miles) of territory in the south of the war-torn country since the counteroffensive began.

A separate statement posted by Ukraine's Military Media Center, which coordinates updates from Kyiv's Defense Ministry, said on Monday that between June 19 and June 25, Ukraine had destroyed 34 tanks.

This comes in lower than figures published by Ukraine's General Staff in its daily updates. Between Monday June 19 and Sunday June 25, the General Staff said Russian forces had lost 46 tanks.

On Wednesday, the General Staff said Russian tank losses since February 2022 had surpassed 4,000, which experts told Newsweek was a "staggering figure" that was likely accurate. However, this count probably includes some armored vehicles as well as tanks, analysts said.

According to the Dutch open-source outlet Oryx, which monitors both Ukrainian and Russian military losses, Russia has lost 2,061 tanks, as of Monday.

The counteroffensive is still in its earlier stages. A more concerted push is still expected to come.

In his address on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces "are suffering losses, which we need."

Ukrainian forces have "again been undertaking major offensive operations on three main axes in southern and eastern Ukraine" in recent days, the British Defense Ministry said on Sunday. Kyiv's fighters are making use of the experience gained in the first two weeks of the counteroffensive to hone in on how to target "the deep, well prepared Russian defences," the government department added in a post to Twitter.

"Ukrainian units are making gradual but steady tactical progress in key areas," the U.K. government said.

Both Kyiv and Moscow's troops carried out "limited ground attacks" between western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhzhia on Sunday, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank.