Ukraine claimed small advances on Monday in its counteroffensive in the southeast of the country, hunting for a place to drive a wedge through Russian defenses, a key to its hopes for recapturing wide swaths of territory lost to the Russian invasion last year. After a week of fierce combat with infantry, artillery and tanks, across a mostly agricultural landscape, Ukrainian forces, newly armed and trained by Western allies, have retaken seven small villages and settlements, Hannah Malyar, a deputy defense minister, wrote on the messaging platform Telegram, including one that the military said it had captured on Monday. The deepest advance was about 4 miles, and “the area of territory taken under control is 90 square kilometers,” about 35 square miles, she wrote. The significance of those gains remains to be seen, and military analysts have said it will take weeks or months, not days, to gauge the success of the offensive Ukraine began last week across a broad stretch of the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Progress is measured in yards, or at most a mile or so, the Ukrainian gains have involved tiny farming villages, and there has been no sign so far of a significant break in the Russian occupiers’ dense network of defenses.

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Persons: Hannah Malyar Locations: Ukraine, Western, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia