The British Defense Ministry's intelligence update Friday on Ukraine said, "Russia's withdrawal from the west bank of the Dnipro River last month has provided the Ukrainian Armed Forces with opportunities to strike additional Russian logistics nodes and lines of communication."

"This threat has highly likely prompted Russian logisticians to relocate supply

nodes, including rail transfer points, further south and east," according to the report posted on Twitter. "Russian logistics units will need to conduct extra labour-intensive loading and unloading from rail to road transport. Road moves will subsequently still be vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery as they move on to supply Russian forward defensive positions."

The ministry said, "Russia's shortage of munitions [exacerbated bv these logistics challenges] is likely one of the main factors currently limiting Russia's potential to restart effective, large scale offensive ground operations."

U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday after meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron that he would be willing to talk with Russan President Valdimir Putin only if Putin is looking to put a stop to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden said any meeting he would have with Putin would be done after consulting with NATO allies. "I'm not going to do it on my own," he said.

In his daily address Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recalled a referendum held 31 years ago on December 1 "that united the entire territory of our state ... Everyone expressed their support."

"People confirmed the Act of Proclamation of Independence of Ukraine - freely and legally. It was a real referendum ... an honest referendum, and that is why it was recognized by the world ... Ukrainian rules will prevail," the president said in a swipe at the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy also said in his speech that he wants to ensure Ukraine's spiritual independence, in a likely reference to a recent raid on Ukraine's Russian-affiliated Monastery of the Caves, a 1,000-year-old Eastern Orthodox monastery in Kyiv, where security forces were looking to flush out spies housed among the clerics.

An adviser to Zelenskyy says as many as 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Mykhailo Podolyak told the Kanel 24 television channel Thursday that between 10,000 to 13,000 soldiers have been killed in the conflict.

Reuters is reporting that three people were killed and seven were wounded overnight in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson region. (KB/VOA)