israeli police beating with batons. live from cnn center, this is cnn newsroom with michael holmes. ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy says more than a thousand towns and villages have been retaken so far from russian forces, including six more over just the past 24 hours. he says the russian military is paying a heavy price for its aggression. translator: today we can report 200 downed russian military aircraft. russia has not lost so many aircraft in any war in decades, and russia has lost almost 27,000 soldiers. ukraine also says russian troops continue to retreat from around the city of kharkiv in the north. farther south, ukraine claims it successfully blocked a russian advance at a key river. you re looking at drone video there showing pontoon bridges destroyed. also tanks and other heavy equipment destroyed as well. meanwhile, russia s top general and the u.s. defense secretary spoke by phone for an hour on saturday, their first chat since the war began.
special forces here warn as a soldier was wounded by a booby trap three days ago. the ze d-markings of russia s invasion still a deranged sign of their collective insanity even two months on. why do they do this? they say they reclaimed this area about a week ago, but they re now in the difficult task of demining what they can. but look around here. there is really not much left to make safe. these civilians evacuated from the next village, just two kilometers away. it s a nightmare, she says. the shooting is heavy the driver adds when we let them race on. desperation takes different forms here, and caught by another kind of survival is dimitri, whose wife moved away a while ago, wheeling back food he s got for his six dogs. i haven t really left my home