Ukraine retakes territory in the east amid Russian attacks

Ukraine pressed its counteroffensive against Russian troops Wednesday, pushing them back from the northeastern city of Kharkiv in what observers say could bring a new phase to the conflict even as U.S intelligence officials warned that Moscow was preparing for a protracted war.

The Ukrainian military said it was able to claw back a constellation of settlements north of Kharkiv, driving back Russian troops to less than a dozen miles from the Russian border.

The move, said Kharkiv regional Gov. Oleh Sinegubov, reduces pressure on Kharkiv city, Ukraine’s second-largest and a primary target of the Russian invasion since the beginning of the war.

“The occupiers had even less opportunity to fire on the regional center,” Sinegubov said on his channel on the Telegram messaging app Wednesday.

A house lies destroyed in a village retaken by Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

(Felipe Dana / Associated Press)

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lauded his troops’ advance, saying that they demonstrated “superhuman strength.” But he cautioned his compatriots not to “spread excessive emotions” or expect a quick victory.

“It is not necessary to create such an atmosphere of specific moral pressure, when certain victories are expected weekly and even daily,” he said.

Zelensky’s words appeared to dovetail with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency director’s characterization of the conflict as deadlocked.

“The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning, and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,” Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, shortly before the House resoundingly approved $40 billion in additional weapons and other aid for Kyiv.

Despite that assessment, Russia seemed eager Wednesday to secure its territorial gains in Ukraine, with a Moscow-installed administrator in Kherson — the first city to fall in the war — calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex the area rather than leave it to become a Russia-aligned breakaway republic like those declared by separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

“The city of Kherson is Russia,” Kirill Stremousov was quoted as saying in a report by the state RIA Novosti news agency. “There will be no Kherson People’s Republic on the territory of the Kherson region, there will be no referendums. It will be a decree based on an appeal from the Kherson regional leadership to the Russian president, and there will be a request to include the region into a proper region of the Russian Federation.”

Later, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told reporters that “such a fateful decision must have an absolutely clear legal background, a legal justification [and] be absolutely legitimate, as was the case with Crimea.”

Russia annexed Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea with an ethnic-Russian majority and a vital Russian naval base, in 2014. The annexation has not been recognized by the West and sparked eight years of fighting between Ukrainian forces and Kremlin-backed separatists that killed 14,000 people before Russia…