The Ukrainian armed forces officially announced on Wednesday morning the liberation of the village of Urozhane, one of the redoubts fortified by the Russians to protect the road to Mariupol, and new images appeared on social media of strikes on fleeing Russian soldiers, Reuters reported.

“The crop has been released,” Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Hanna Malyar wrote in Telegram. “Our defenders are sitting on the edge [localității]”, she added.

The official confirmation from the Ukrainian side came after foreign journalists and observers of the war in Ukraine wrote about the liberation of the city from Tuesday, information on this matter is also transmitted by Russian military bloggers and the Russian press.

The commander of the pro-Russian separatist battalion “Vostok” in Donetsk, Oleksandr Khodakovsky, said that the village was abandoned because “the reinforcements promised in Urozhany, which were supposed to arrive the next day, did not arrive.” He also noted that “not a single house in the village was surrendered without a fight” and “everyone performed their duties as best they could.”

He then returned and stated that the separatists had not completely stopped fighting for the village, but that any attempts at a counterattack seemed to have failed.

The village of Urozhayne is located in the south of Donetsk Oblast, on the border with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and was turned by Russian forces into a veritable redoubt at the center of their multi-layered defensive lines, as the military command in Moscow anticipated that the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive could be launched southward to try to cut off Russian forces and a land corridor to Crimea.

The second most powerful redoubt in the district is Georgiivka, another village 16 kilometers south of Urozhany. The Ukrainians must also capture the site in order to launch a concerted offensive against the port city of Mariupol as part of their plans to isolate Russian forces in the south of the country into two separate groups.

A new Ukrainian strike with cluster munitions on the Russian military

A video has already appeared on social networks showing a new shelling of Ukrainians with cluster munitions on Russian soldiers who were retreating from Urozhany to one of the neighboring cities:

Last week, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine released two videos showing Russian troops retreating in an open field in Urozhany, being fired upon by the following US-sourced munitions, suffering heavy casualties:

John Kirby, a representative of the security service of the White House, said on July 20 that the Ukrainian troops used ammunition “quite effectively”. His comments came on the same day that the first video of Russian soldiers being attacked with cluster munitions appeared on social media.

It appears that the U.S. military sent cluster munitions to Ukrainian forces rather than cluster bombs, the difference being that the former are launched by artillery and the latter by aircraft.

It will be recalled that President Joe Biden said that the decision to supply such controversial ammunition to Ukraine was made because the United States, including the United States, began to run out of 155-mm shells used by artillery in the absence of the American arms industry. ready to deal with the need for large-scale conventional warfare.

Follow the latest events of the 539th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.