Vladimir Putin has visited navy command posts in occupied areas of Ukraine, an indication the Russian president retains his territorial ambitions greater than a yr since he launched his invasion of the nation.

Putin visited troops within the Kherson and Luhansk areas and heard studies from discipline commanders as fierce combating raged within the north-eastern metropolis of Bakhmut, the Kremlin mentioned on Tuesday.

State TV footage didn’t instantly clarify the president’s actual places in the course of the journey, which the Kremlin mentioned Putin made spontaneously on Monday. The go to can be Putin’s closest to the frontline areas, which Russia is now claiming as its personal territory, for the reason that conflict started.

It’s his second journey to occupied Ukraine after he made a short cease in March in Mariupol, a south-eastern port metropolis razed by Russian forces within the early weeks of the invasion.

“The president is visiting the brand new areas [claimed by Russia] extra usually. He’s checking the command centres and getting data on the bottom. That is extremely necessary for the commander-in-chief,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov instructed reporters.

Russia has made current incremental features in Bakhmut, the Donetsk metropolis it partly occupies the place there was months of attritional combating, whereas Ukraine prepares to launch a counter-offensive.

Ukraine’s navy leaders have mentioned they intend to grind down Russia’s troops in hotspots corresponding to Bakhmut. “The epicentre of hostilities stays Bakhmut,” Colonel-Common Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s floor forces, mentioned on Tuesday.

“Our fighters are inflicting important losses on the enemy and considerably slowing down [Putin’s] offensive actions.”

However Kyiv’s western backers and a few outstanding Ukrainian officers have expressed worries Ukraine will face difficulties mounting the counter-offensive after taking main losses throughout Russia’s onslaught.

On his go to, Putin gave troops in Kherson an icon he mentioned was beforehand owned by a Tsarist defence minister, in accordance with state newswire Ria Novosti.

The imperial and non secular iconography underscored the symbolic significance of Putin’s journey and indicated he had no inclination to desert the invasion, which he has come to outline as an existential wrestle for Russia’s survival.

Putin seemed to be referring to Grigory Potemkin, the commander of Russia’s land forces beneath Catherine the Nice within the 18th century, who ruled the southern a part of Ukraine and captured the Crimean peninsula.

That might draw a direct parallel with Putin’s personal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and botched try to say 4 south-eastern provinces together with Kherson final September. Russian troops have been later compelled to make a humiliating retreat from Kherson’s provincial capital after Kyiv’s counter-offensive.

Although Bakhmut holds little strategic significance, Russia’s full seize of town would mark its first main acquire because it ended the siege of Mariupol final spring.

Russia and Ukraine have hooked up important symbolic worth to Bakhmut as casualties have mounted on each side. Wagner, a Russian non-public paramilitary unit largely composed of ex-convicts pardoned by Putin that’s infamous for its brutality, has misplaced many fighters within the battle for town.

Putin’s go to additionally marked the primary look of a outstanding discipline commander, Mikhail Teplinsky, since a dispute that adopted a reshuffle of Russia’s command construction in early January.

Teplinsky, a commander of Russia’s paratroopers, disappeared from view quickly afterwards in an obvious energy wrestle, resurfacing in late February solely to complain he had been faraway from lively fight operations.

A UK Ministry of Defence report on Sunday mentioned troops beneath Teplinsky’s command had “resumed a key mission within the battle for Bakhmut, and sure undertaken novel integration with TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers” in Kreminna, a Luhansk metropolis about 70km from Bakhmut.

Extra reporting by Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv