APORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Ukraine has claimed the first battlefield gains since the launch of its counteroffensive against Russian forces, saying it liberated a string of villages over the weekend after fierce fighting on the war's southern and eastern front lines.
Ukraine’s 35th brigade posted video Monday of soldiers raising the blue-and-yellow national flag over what they say is the retaken village of Storozheve in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine’s defense ministry said its military had also retaken three other nearby villages as it seeks to push south and threaten Russia's main defensive lines.
“It will be the same with every settlement until we liberate all Ukrainian land,” said Hanna Maliar, the deputy defense minister.
The gains were much-celebrated on social media. But they are small-scale victories in the early days of what is expected to be a long and difficult effort to drive the Kremlin’s forces out of occupied land across the country's south and east.
“Appropriate counteroffensive and defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine. I will not say in detail at what stage they are,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a weekend news conference in Kyiv, his first public acknowledgement of the campaign.
Ukrainian officials have asked for operational silence to avoid compromising their battlefield efforts, but in recent days reported their first successes.
Russian officials have not confirmed the losses, but the country's increasingly influential military bloggers acknowledged the initial setbacks — beginning with the village of Blahodatne.
Valeriy Shershen, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said that Russian forces had entrenched in the village club there and were driven out only after house-to-house combat.
“After the fighting ended, people came out of the basements and greeted their liberators. It was a very poignant moment that inspires and creates motivation to move forward,” he said in a statement.
The launch of the counteroffensive has also seen the battlefield debut of western-supplied armored vehicles, including German Leopard tanks and American-made Bradley fighting vehicles.
Video footage reviewed by NBC News showed Ukrainian forces using Bradleys in combat for the first time near the small city of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region, which has seen some of the fiercest fighting of the counteroffensive so far.
One Bradley was disabled after taking a direct hit, but its heavy armor shielded troops inside from the worst of the impact. Soldiers are seen in the video throwing smoke canisters to hide their escape before evacuating to a second Bradley.
Footage released by the Russian defense ministry shows the aftermath of the same skirmish, with both Bradleys and Leopards left disabled or partially destroyed. It was not clear what losses Russian forces may have suffered during the encounter.