• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says his military has retaken two settlements in southern Kherson region.
• That would represent a major forward thrust of about 20 miles, threatening Russian-held territory.
• Russia’s troops abandoned Lyman over the weekend to avoid encirclement.

Ukrainian forces appeared to make significant new gains on Monday, piling pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin as the Kremlin faced growing domestic unease over the state of its faltering military and the disorganised efforts to strengthen it.

Ukraine’s troops were pushing forward in the east and south of the country, threatening a major new breakthrough and forcing Putin’s troops to retreat from territory he claimed to have annexed in a grand ceremony last week.

Moscow has matched its annexation claims with a call-up of reservists and new nuclear threats, threatening to escalate its conflict with Ukraine’s Western allies while also exposing domestic vulnerabilities.

Russian lawmakers ratified the illegal annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian regions on Monday, including Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. While the Kremlin claimed it had not yet decided where the borders for its newly claimed land would be established, the areas under its control were rapidly shrinking.

Moscow said its troops left Lyman over the weekend to avoid being surrounded, while Western officials and observers hailed Ukraine’s recapture of the city in the eastern Donetsk region as a significant development that could pave the way for further advances.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also announced that his military had retaken two settlements in the Kherson region’s south. “Our soldiers’ successes are not limited to Lyman,” he said in a Telegram statement on Sunday.

That was the first official indication of significant Ukrainian gains in the south, where Russia concentrated the majority of its forces to repel a long-touted counteroffensive, leaving itself vulnerable to a surprise push in the northeast that has turned the tide of the war.

Ukraine appeared to be surging forward in the south after weeks of slow progress and relentless artillery fire.

“Superior enemy tank units were successful in wedging into the depths of our defence,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a Telegram update.

“The information is tense, to put it mildly,” Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed leader in occupied parts of Kherson, told Russian state television, according to Reuters.

“There’s a town called Dudchany right along the Dnieper River, and there was a (Ukrainian) breakthrough right there,” he explained. This would represent a significant forward thrust of about 20 miles, threatening thousands of Russian troops on the river’s west bank.

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