With Probes of Russian Lines, Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Takes Shape

In the south, Ukrainian soldiers are fighting on an unforgiving landscape, table-flat farmland with little cover for troops trying to advance.

Sixty miles away, they are attacking across the plains in a coal mining region dotted with slag heaps, pushing toward a strategic railway junction.

Farther east, they are targeting Russian positions on the hills outside Bakhmut, a city in ruins that fell to Russian forces last month after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. Ukrainian forces have advanced by about a mile at some parts of the front line there, the military said on Saturday.

In fierce battles along the front line this past week, Ukraine’s push to reclaim lost territory is taking shape, presenting a major pivot in the war. With each clash, Ukraine is trying to show that it can attack anywhere, while trying to make Russia defend everywhere.

After days of silence on the extent of the fighting, President Volodymyr Zelensky offered the strongest confirmation yet on Saturday that the long-awaited counteroffensive had begun.

“Counteroffensive and defensive actions are being taken in Ukraine,” he said at a news conference in Kyiv with the visiting Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau. “At what stage, I will not disclose in detail.”

The multipronged assault, concentrated along the front in the south and the east, is a test run of Ukraine’s new arsenal of Western tanks and armored vehicles as well as tens of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers who trained in Europe for months in preparation for the fighting. Kyiv, which as expected in the early stages is suffering casualties, will need to show significant progress in its counteroffensive to keep the money and weapons flowing from the West.

Over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces firing rockets and artillery hit four Russian command centers, six areas of concentration of personnel, weapons and military equipment, three ammunition depots and five enemy artillery units in firing positions, Ukraine’s military said. The claims could not be independently verified.

The flurry of initial attacks, staged under a cloak of secrecy by the Ukrainian Army, is intended to probe for weak points and lure Russia into revealing its defensive strategies too soon, before the bulk of Ukraine’s new force is put into the fight. Out in the expanse of farmland, the two armies are maneuvering and hiding their hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and howitzers in tiny villages and thickets of trees, lest the other side guess where their forces are concentrated.

Once in full motion, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is expected to be one of the largest military operations in Europe since World War II.

Already, Kyiv has deployed soldiers from the 47th Mechanized Brigade, one of nine units formed in October specifically to recapture occupied land and armed with M16 rifles instead of the Kalashnikovs that most Ukrainian soldiers use. On dusty farm roads, American Humvee vehicles bump along over the potholes, Ukrainian flags flapping from their antennas.

Ukraine’s army has sent forward German Leopard 2 tanks and American Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, upgrading its aging fleet of Soviet-legacy armored vehicles. In all, Ukraine has received hundreds of Western tanks, armored vehicles and machines for breaching minefields.

Its forces have been confronting a formidable line of defenses built by the Russians over months with dense layers of mines, trenches and concrete tank barriers. In the tense fighting, some of the new Western weapons have been left behind or destroyed, their battered carcasses shown abandoned amid dirt-crusted fields cratered by artillery in Russian propaganda videos.

The Ukrainian government has been mostly silent about its opening moves, citing the need to maintain an element of surprise. The Russian government has been triumphal in claims of fending off attacks while offering little evidence.

American officials, who said in recent days that the counteroffensive appeared to be underway, have said it is too early to make broad assessments, although they have generally been bullish on the prospects for Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Each location has a strategic import for Kyiv.

In recent days, fights have been raging both in the Zaporizhzhia region near the farming town of Orikhiv and to the east in the Donetsk region, near Velyka Novosilka, once a sleepy, rural town crisscrossed by country roads surrounded by coal mines and sunflower fields.

Advancing from either of these two sites in the south, long considered a focal point of any Ukrainian counteroffensive, could allow the Ukrainian forces to drive a wedge into Russian-occupied territory, cutting rail and road links and splitting it into two zones. Such gains would give them a chance to cut Russia’s…