Deputy defence minister tells Guardian that Ukrainian forces are making progress, with far fewer deaths than Russia
Daniel Boffey in Kyiv
The centre of the fighting in Ukraine has switched to the road to Mariupol, where the Ukrainian offensive is slowly pushing back Russian forces, and British Challenger tanks are ready to join battle, a minister in Kyiv has said.
Hanna Maliar, a deputy defence minister, said the most active fighting was no longer around Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, but in the south, and specifically in the direction of the two coastal cities of Berdiansk and Mariupol.
“If in the first week the epicentre was the east, now we see that the fighting is moving to the south and now we see the most active areas are Berdiansk and Mariupol,” Maliar said. “In the east, the enemy has turned on all the forces to stop our offensive. And they are massing forces there to stop us. In the south they are not very successful.”
“There is progress on all southern directions, and there are several of them,” the minister added. “If we talk about losses, in the Bakhmut sector, nine times more Russians were killed than Ukrainians. And in the southern direction, Russians died 5.3 times more than Ukrainians.”
The movement towards Mariupol, infamous for the devastation visited upon it in the first months of the full-scale invasion, is still incremental, with the front said to have been pushed back by about a kilometre.
In his nightly video address, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that movement forward was “the most critical thing”. He added: “Every soldier, every new step we take, every metre of Ukrainian land freed from the enemy is of utmost importance.”
Maliar said the specific numbers of losses endured by both sides remained classified information. “We don’t have huge losses, but of course it is a war and there are losses.”
The UK has donated 14 Challenger 2 tanks. They form part of the western hardware, along with German Leopard tanks and US Bradley armoured vehicles, that has equipped nine new mechanised brigades for the offensive launched two weeks ago.
Only one Challenger 2 tank has ever been destroyed in combat, when it was hit by friendly fire in Basra during the Iraq war.
Maliar dismissed Vladimir Putin’s claims that much of the weaponry donated by the west had been destroyed.
She said: “On the contrary, western equipment has shown that it can save the lives of the crews and they really help to liberate our territories. That is why we are very grateful for the weapons and equipment provided by our western partners, including the UK.
“The Challenger tanks are at the disposal of the airborne assault troops. They are now waiting for their time. They are loaded, armed, but they are still waiting.”
Putin also suggested, without evidence, on Friday that Ukraine’s losses were 10 times as heavy as those endured by Russia, while the Russian defence ministry said its forces had killed about 500 Ukrainian soldiers and destroyed five tanks in Donetsk in the last 24 hours.
Russia’s president claimed that Ukraine would soon be out of home-manufactured hardware and that he remained focused on his aim of “denazifying” Ukraine, adding, in a bizarre aside, that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was “not a real Jew”.
“I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin told an annual economic forum in St Petersburg. “They say that Zelenskiy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people. I’m not joking.”
Maliar said Russian reserves had been moved from the south to the east in recent days. “Last week I went to deliver a letter to two brigades in the Bakhmut sector who have successfully advanced there,” she said. “The president personally handwrote a letter of gratitude to them and I personally handed them this letter.”
On Friday, Kyiv came under attack again from cruise and ballistic missiles as the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, joined a group of African leaders in Ukraine’s capital on a peace mission. They will visit Moscow next.
The Ukrainian air force said it had shot down six Russian Kalibr cruise missiles, six Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles and two reconnaissance drones.
At the end of a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels, Germany’s Boris Pistorius said his country would deliver another 64 Patriot missiles to Ukraine to help shield it against Russia’s aerial attacks.
A delegation of security officials, diplomats and journalists supposed to be accompanying the South African president to Kyiv was stranded on a separately chartered plane at Warsaw’s airport for more than 24 hours after the Polish authorities found that they were carrying undocumented firearms.