Ukraine Appears to Make a Small Gain in the South as Counteroffensive Continues

Ukrainian forces have retaken a small village in the south of the country, a local Russian official and military bloggers said on Sunday, one of the first reports of a territorial gain in the Zaporizhzhia region since the start of a major counteroffensive earlier this month.

Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed regional official, said on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian troops had taken the village of Piatykhatky “under operational control,” and were entrenching themselves there. Russian forces, he added, were using artillery fire in an attempt to wrest it back.

There was no independent confirmation of those claims. The Ukrainian military’s nightly General Staff update said Russian forces were “on the defensive” in the region, but made no mention of the village.

Piatykhatky is one of many villages along the southern frontline and its recapture, if confirmed, is unlikely to represent a major military breakthrough for Ukraine. Still, it would be the first village retaken in recent days, and add to the seven villages that Ukrainian officials said they had recaptured further east in the Donetsk region as part of the counteroffensive that began about a week and a half ago.

“Our troops are advancing, position by position,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address on Sunday. “Step by step, we are moving forward.”

Those gains so far have come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and advanced Western equipment, but military analysts caution that it could take weeks or months to gauge the success of the counteroffensive.

An official statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense summarizing the fighting on Sunday said that an attack on Piatykhatky had been “repelled.” But Russian military bloggers, who are often the first to announce battlefield developments in Ukraine, said Moscow’s forces had lost the village after three days of intense fighting.

“Our artillery continues to strike at the enemy infantry, entrenched in this village,” wrote Semyon Pegov, who writes under the name War Gonzo and has more than 1.3 million followers on Telegram. Mr. Pegov was among the pro-Kremlin war correspondents who met with President Vladimir V. Putin last week.

Mikhail Zvinchuk, who writes under the pseudonym Rybar, said that Russian units had retreated from the village, but that the fighting continued on its outskirts. Another blog called A Veteran’s Notes, which aggregates other reports along with some commentary and analysis, described ferocious fighting in the area.

A large Ukrainian force was making a sustained attempt to break through Russia’s defensive lines, the unnamed blogger wrote, with losses on both sides and the stench of dead bodies drifting over the battlefield. “Many wounded due to continuous artillery shelling,” the account said.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has intensified the fighting at several points along the front line in the south, but has shown little sign of a significant breakthrough so far. A British defense intelligence report said on Sunday that both sides were suffering high casualties and military experts say that it is likely that months of artillery duels and trench warfare lie ahead. Independent analysts say that it will be difficult for Ukrainian forces to break through heavily fortified Russian lines defended by tank traps, minefields and artillery.

In hopes of making it harder for Russia to fend off the counterattack, Ukraine has followed a pattern it established last year of launching a series of strikes behind the front lines that target ammunition dumps, military infrastructure and other elements of Moscow’s war machine.

Military officials said on Sunday that Ukraine had struck an ammunition dump near the village of Rykove, in the Kherson region. The claims could not be immediately verified, but satellite imagery reviewed by The Times showed heavy damage in an industrial area adjacent to a rail line in Rykove, with smoke still rising from the debris on Sunday morning.

Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa military administration, posted video footage on the Telegram messaging app that was taken from a distance but appeared to show a large fire and smoke billowing above fields.

“Our armed forces dealt a good blow in the morning, and a very loud one, in the village of Rykove,” Mr. Bratchuk wrote. There was no immediate comment from Russian authorities.

The area is significant because it is close to a bridge connecting Crimea — which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 — with a belt of land occupied by Russia north of the Sea of Azov. Military analysts say that one of the probable goals of the counteroffensive is to cut the land bridge that connects Crimea to Russia.

Rykove is about 70 miles behind the closest area of the front line, the Dnipro River, where Ukrainian forces control the west bank and Russian forces the east. It was not clear how the attack took place, but that would put the village in the range of an attack by a long-range Storm Shadow missile, which Britain said in recent weeks it had donated to Ukraine. The U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket is also capable of hitting targets dozens of miles behind the front lines.

• Dam disaster: As Ukraine pursues its counteroffensive, it continues to deal with the aftermath of an explosion on June 6 that destroyed the Kakhovka dam on the lower Dnipro River, flooding parts of the Kherson region and elsewhere and causing environmental devastation.

  The death toll continued to climb on Sunday. In the Ukrainian-held territory, 17 people have died in the flooding and 31 others are missing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a Telegram post. In the Russia-occupied portion of the Kherson region, a Kremlin-backed official, Andrei Alekseyenko, reported six more deaths, raising the death toll to 35.

  Moscow has blamed Ukraine for the explosion, but evidence suggests that the dam, which was controlled by Russian forces, was destroyed from within.

  Denise Brown, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine, said in a statement on Sunday that the Kremlin had declined a request to access Russian-controlled areas to provide emergency assistance. “Aid cannot be denied to people who need it,” she said.

• Border shelling: Ukrainian and Russian officials reported shelling in civilian areas on both sides of Ukraine’s northeastern border on Sunday. Roman Starovoit, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region, said that Ukraine had targeted three settlements in the Glushkovsky district. Across the border, about 40 miles away, a father and his 4-year-old son were killed by shelling in Ukraine’s Sumy region, the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said.

• NATO membership: President Biden has been facing pressure from Ukraine’s allies to hasten Ukraine’s NATO membership bid and offer a more certain path to joining the alliance, but he has not yet changed his stance. On Saturday, Mr. Biden appeared to reinforce that position, suggesting that there would be no quick route for Ukraine, which submitted an application to join the alliance last September.

  “They’ve got to meet the same standards. So we’re not going to make it easy,” the president told reporters. Membership in the alliance, which would put Ukraine under NATO’s security umbrella, is viewed by Mr. Zelensky as a core strategic objective. It will probably be discussed next month at a NATO summit in Lithuania.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed reporting.