AFU General Staff reports Russian troops forced out of 20 settlements overnight

Ukraine has driven Russian troops out of more than 20 settlements within one day, the AFU General Staff reports in its September 12 morning summary on Facebook.

By the morning of September 12, the Russian army was forced to retreat, leaving the settlements of Velyky Burluk and Dvurechnaya in the Kharkov region and the town of Svatovo in the Luhansk region. The General Staff says that only members of “people's militia” recruited from local residents remained in Svatovo.

During the retreat, Russian troops abandoned their positions and fled deep into the occupied territories or into Russia. Over the past 24 hours, Russian servicemen in their retreat took with them looted property and cars from local residents in the Kharkiv region, the report said. According to the General Staff, Russia is now concentrating forces in order to establish control over the territory of Donetsk Region, maintain temporarily occupied territories, and disrupt the offensive of Ukrainian forces.

As a result of the counterattack in the Kherson direction, Russia “suffered significant losses in manpower.” The report claims that the 810th Independent Marine Guards Brigade (permanently stationed in Sevastopol) lost almost 85% of its personnel.

The General Staff also stressed that the threat of air and missile strikes on the entire territory of Ukraine still persists. Over the past 24 hours, the Russian Federation carried out “18 missile and 39 air strikes on military and civilian targets in Ukraine.”

“More than 30 population centers were affected, in particular Kramatorsk, Konstantinovka, Dnepr, Pavlograd, and Velikomikhailovka. The Russians committed another act of terrorism - a missile strike on the Kharkiv thermal power plant, the city’s critical infrastructure facility. As a result, several regions were partially left without power.”

The AFU destroyed “one Orlan-10 type UAV, shot down one X-59 guided missile, four Kalibr missiles and five X-101 missiles.”

Earlier, a video of the AFU soldiers in the border village of Strelechye in the Kharkiv region was published on social media. It was reported that after seizing the village, Ukrainian troops took control of the entire state border with Russia up to the Luhansk Region.