"Thanks to everyone who did everything possible on this most difficult night for Kharkiv to normalize the life of the city as soon as possible." Meanwhile in Russia, signs of disarray emerged as Russian military bloggers and other commentators chastised the Kremlin for failing to mobilize more forces and take stronger action against Ukraine. "You are heroes!!!" Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram, referring to crews who restored utilities in Ukraine's second-biggest city. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city and the capital of the region where the gains have been made, authorities hailed that power and water had been restored to about 80% of the region's population following Russian attacks on infrastructure that knocked out electricity in many places across Ukraine. The mood was jubilant across the country. Ukraine's deputy interior minister accused fleeing Russian forces of burning official documents and concealing bodies in an attempt to cover up rights violations in the areas they controlled until last week. Military intelligence spokesman Andrey Yusov said the captured troops included "significant" numbers of Russian officers. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich did not specify the number of Russian prisoners but said the POWs would be exchanged for Ukrainian service members held by Moscow. Momentum has switched back and forth before, but rarely with such a big and sudden swing. It was not yet clear if the Ukrainian blitz could signal a turning point in the war. Now Ukrainian teams are disarming land mines and other unexploded weapons in the recaptured areas and searching for any remaining Russian troops, officials said. In his evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his forces have liberated more than 6,000 square kilometers (2,300 square miles) in the east and the south since the beginning of September. Other videos showed Ukrainians inspecting the wreckage of Russian military vehicles, including tanks. In one scene, a fighter wiped his boots on a Russian flag on the ground. Video taken by the Ukrainian military showed soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over battle-damaged buildings. Then at noon, they suddenly started shouting wildly and began to run away, charging off in tanks and armored vehicles," Dmytro Hrushchenko, a resident of recently liberated Zaliznychne, a small town near the eastern front line, told Sky News. Reports of chaos abounded as Russian troops pulled out. Russian collection of flags Patch#The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged the setback in a map that showed its troops pressed back along a narrow patch of land on the border with Russia - a tacit admission of big Ukrainian gains. The counteroffensive left the Kremlin struggling for a response to its largest military defeat in Ukraine since Russian forces pulled back from areas near Kyiv after a botched attempt to capture the capital early in the invasion. "In some areas of the front, our defenders reached the state border with the Russian Federation," said Oleh Syniehubov, governor of the northeastern Kharkiv region. After months of little discernible movement on the battlefield, the momentum has lifted Ukrainian morale and provoked rare public criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war. In recent days, Kyiv's forces have captured territory at least twice the size of greater London, according to the British Defense Ministry. The Ukrainian military said it had freed more than 20 settlements in 24 hours. Blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fluttered over newly liberated towns across a wide swath of reclaimed land. A spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence said Russian troops were surrendering en masse as "they understand the hopelessness of their situation." A Ukrainian presidential adviser said there were so many POWs that the country was running out of space to accommodate them. KHARKIV: Ukrainian troops expanded their territorial gains Monday, pushing all the way to the country's northeastern border in places, and claimed to have captured a record number of Russian soldiers as part of the lightning advance that forced Moscow to make a hasty retreat.
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