The Institute for the Study of War, citing a Russian claim, said Ukraine was using Russian T-72 tanks as it tries to push into the Russian-held region of Luhansk. “The initial panic of the counterattack led Russian troops to abandon higher-quality equipment in working order, rather than the more damaged equipment left behind by Russian forces retreating from Kyiv in April, further indicating the severity of the Russian debacle,” it said. The institute. . Earlier this month, Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, pushing into territory around its second-largest city, Kharkiv. Videos and photos showed Ukrainian troops seizing tanks, ammunition and other weapons left behind by Moscow in an apparently chaotic withdrawal. In the aftermath of the counterattack, Ukrainian officials found hundreds of graves near the once-occupied city of Izium. Yevhenii Yenin, a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, told a national television show that officials exhuming the dead there found bodies “with signs of violent death.” “There are a lot of them,” Yenin said. “It’s broken ribs and broken heads, men with bound hands, broken jaws and severed genitalia.” Ukrainian officials have also alleged that Russian forces tortured people in occupied territories, including shocking them with Soviet-era walkie-talkies. Russia has repeatedly denied abusing or killing prisoners, although Ukrainian officials have found mass graves around the city of Bukha since easing a Russian offensive targeting Kyiv at the start of the war. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian push continues in the south of the country. The institute, citing the Ukrainian military, said Kyiv destroyed ammunition depots, two command posts and an electronic warfare system. Ukraine’s southern military command announced early Tuesday that its troops had sunk a Russian barge carrying troops and weapons across the Dnipro River near the Russian-held town of Nova Kakhovka. He gave no further details about the sinking of the barge in Ukraine’s Russian-held Kherson region, which has been a major target as part of Kiev’s ongoing counteroffensive in the country. In other developments: — The website of a prominent Russian mercenary group has apparently been targeted by hackers. The Wagner Group website could not be reached Tuesday morning. Late Monday, Ukraine’s IT Army, a pro-Kyiv hacker group, released a screenshot apparently showing the site had been replaced with images of dead Russian soldiers. — Moscow has likely moved its Kilo-class submarines from their station on the Crimean peninsula in southern Russia over fears they could be hit by long-range Ukrainian fire, the British military said Tuesday. In a daily intelligence briefing, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said those submarines had “almost certainly” been moved to Krasnodar Krai in mainland Russia, rather than a naval base in Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. “This is most likely due to the recent change in the local security threat level in the face of increased Ukrainian long-range strike capability,” the British said. “In the past two months, the fleet headquarters and the main naval airfield have come under attack.”
Follow AP’s war coverage at
