The Russian Defense Ministry has denied reports by Russian military bloggers that hundreds of soldiers from a unit were killed in an unsuccessful offensive in the town of Pavlivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region.

Statements by bloggers that the 155th Marine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet had suffered "heavy, senseless losses of people and materiel" were false, the ministry said on Monday.

Rather, in the past two weeks, the unit has advanced up to five kilometers behind the Ukrainian defense lines.

The ministry in Moscow also rejected allegations that the brigade commanders had proved incompetent.

Thanks to the commanders, casualties amounted to no more than one percent of combat strength, the ministry said.

Nicholas Zimmerman

Editor in Politics.

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The British secret service assumes that Russia will not be able to gain air supremacy over the attacked Ukraine in the coming months either.

Russian fighter jet losses likely far exceeded the capacity to produce new planes, a status report said.

The time required to train competent pilots further limits Russian capabilities.

Ukraine accuses Russian troops of looting abandoned houses in the occupied southern Ukrainian regional capital of Kherson.

While the residents were being forcibly evicted and Russia was talking about "evacuation," officers from the Russian military and the FSB secret service robbed the houses, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter.

Last week, the Russian occupiers indicated a possible military withdrawal from the areas west of the Dnipro River.

Ukrainian authorities, on the other hand, had spoken of the "illusion" of a Russian withdrawal.

According to an analysis of satellite images commissioned by the British broadcaster BBC, around 1,500 new graves have been dug in a burial ground northwest of the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February, more than 4,600 graves have been created in the field.

Eyewitnesses in Mariupol told the BBC they had seen the Russian occupiers picking up and transporting bodies from the rubble of destroyed buildings in recent months.