The Russian army is divided between the defense of its border, which has turned out to be extremely vulnerable to enemy incursions, and the offensive in Donbas, where Chechen units have replaced the mercenaries of the Wagner group, writes the Spanish news agency EFE on Sunday, quoted by Agerpres.

Belgorod Oblast, the weakest link on the border as it shares 540 kilometers with Ukraine’s Luhansk, Kharkiv and Sumy Oblasts, has been under constant attacks for the past two weeks, and apparently there was nothing the Kremlin could do to stop it.

Meanwhile, Kyiv claims that everything is ready for a counteroffensive, the first step of which would be to force Russia to withdraw troops from Ukraine to protect its territory.

Belgorod, front line

Belgorod is no longer the rear of the front, but its first line. Its governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, informs Russians and the whole world on his Telegram channel about the daily bombings, which killed seven civilians on Friday and Saturday.

“Listen to the authorities and temporarily leave your homes to save the most important thing — your life and the lives of your loved ones,” he wrote on Sunday.

The official explained that his appeal does not only apply to the Shebekino district, which was the most affected by shelling in recent days, but to all districts that were bombarded.

Gladkov, who estimates that more than 4,000 civilians have already been evacuated, announced on Saturday the urgent evacuation of 600 children from border towns, and another 1,000 will be sent to the annexed Crimean peninsula.

The governor and other hard-liners in Russia called on the authorities to take the threat seriously once and for all and create a safety zone about 40 kilometers wide in the neighboring Kharkiv region.

A new Russian military invasion

In the middle of the day, the governor acknowledged a new incursion by a group of enemy saboteurs, an action that would lead to fighting in the town of Nova Tavolyanka.

“I hope they will be destroyed. It cannot be otherwise. These fascists are killing the civilians of Belgorod every day (…), maiming children and the elderly,” he said in the video.

The previous two raids by Russian volunteers and the “Freedom of Russia” legion were repelled.

“We continue to crush the enemy. Russia will be free!” – one of the members of the legion, who wants to create a military administration in Belgorod, wrote in Telegram.

Donetsk again

After the capture of Bakhmut, Russian troops are now concentrated on the outskirts of Donetsk, the capital of the region of the same name, the most militarized area on the entire front line since 2014.

The targets are Avdiyivka and Maryinka, where the Chechen special unit “Akhmat” will play the role of paratroopers that were with “Wagner” in Bakhmut.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the Chechens are actively fighting in the center of Maryinka, from where they will advance to Vugledar, a bastion that has resisted them since the beginning of the war.

The ultimate goal, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, appears distant for now, although a military report on Sunday reported the destruction of an ammunition depot in the former Donetsk city.

The defense also claimed that it destroyed a drone factory in the city of Dnipro with high-precision weapons.

Instead, Kyiv reported the death of a two-year-old girl in the same city after a rocket hit a residential quarter.

Counterattack, secret

After assuring The Wall Street Journal a day earlier that the Ukrainians were “ready” to launch a counteroffensive and would not wait “several months” for the arrival of heavy weapons and Western aircraft, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi was much more cautious on Sunday.

“It’s not like in the movies (…) The evacuation of our territory is the result of a counteroffensive. When it happens, you will understand that it is already underway,” he said at a press conference.

In turn, the Ministry of Defense released a video of a group of soldiers with their fingers on their lips with the title: “Plans as silence. We will not announce their start.”

“The adversary is waiting with surprise for the next actions of the Ukrainian army,” Serhiy Cherebaty, the spokesman of the army’s Eastern Command, said on local television.

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