Senior US official: Ukraine making ‘slow but meaningful progress’ against Russia

A senior Pentagon official said Wednesday that Ukrainian forces are making “slow but meaningful progress” against the invading Russian army.

Ukrainian forces are making “slow but meaningful progress” on the battlefield and are currently doing better in the south than Russia, a senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday.

“It is early days. I think the Ukrainians are making slow but meaningful progress. And we’ll see how things pan out,” Reuters quoted US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl as having said at an event hosted by Defense News.

“But I certainly think things are going better on the Ukrainian side right now in the south than is true on the Russian side,” he added.

Ukraine has been waging a counter-offensive in the south of the country since last week, where it also claimed to recapture several villages.

The remarks from the senior US official appeared consistent with ones made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who said on Wednesday that Kyiv troops have recaptured several settlements in the Kharkiv region from Russian forces in the country’s northeast.

“This week we have good news from Kharkiv region,” Zelensky said in his daily address, adding that “now is not the right time to name those settlements, where the Ukrainian flag has returned.”

Observers have reported a breakthrough by Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region in recent days, with no official confirmation of the potential gains.

The Kharkiv region has been partly occupied by Russian troops since the start of the invasion launched on February 24.

The city of the same name — the second largest in Ukraine — is regularly targeted by deadly bombardments, but the Russian troops have never managed to seize it.

Also on Wednesday, the UN’s assistant UN secretary-general for human rights Ilze Brands Kehris told the Security Council that there are credible accusations that Moscow’s forces have transferred children from Ukraine to Russia for adoption as part of larger-scale forced relocations and deportations.

“There have been credible allegations of forced transfers of unaccompanied children to Russian occupied territory, or to the Russian Federation itself,” Brands Kehris said.

“We are concerned that the Russian authorities have adopted a simplified procedure to grant Russian citizenship to children without parental care, and that these children would be eligible for adoption by Russian families,” she said.

Brands Kehris told a Security Council meeting on Ukraine that Russian forces are also running a “filtration” operation in which Ukrainians in occupied territories are put through systematic security checks that have involved “numerous” human rights violations.

“In cases that our office has documented, during ‘filtration,’ Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups have subjected persons to body searches, sometimes involving forced nudity, and detailed interrogations about the personal background, family ties, political views and allegiances of the individual concerned,” she said.

The filtration procedures involved probing people’s mobile devices, obtaining personal identity data, and taking pictures and fingerprints, she said.

Some Ukrainians judged as close to the Ukraine government or military have been tortured and forcibly removed and sent to Russian penal colonies and other detention centers, she said.

“We are particularly concerned that women and girls are at risk of sexual abuse during ‘filtration’ procedures,” she said.

Earlier, the US State Department said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office is directly managing the filtration program and the forced relocation of thousands of Ukrainians into Russia.

“Russia has systematically used the practice of forced deportations previously, and the fear and misery it evokes for people forced to live under the Kremlin’s control are hard to overstate,” said State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel.

“We assess that the Kremlin uses filtration operations as crucial to their efforts to annex areas of Ukraine under their control,” he added.