The guns had gone quiet after three days of fighting in the battle-scarred northeast Ukrainian town of Balakliia, but Mariya Tymofiyeva said it was only when she saw Ukrainian soldiers that it hit her that over six months of Russian occupation had ended.

“I was walking away… when I saw an armoured personnel carrier coming onto the square with a Ukrainian flag: my heart just tightened up and I began to sob,” the 43-year-old resident said, her voice trembling with emotion.

On Tuesday, she was among a crowd of residents receiving food parcels from a van at the same square where the Ukrainian flag was dramatically hoisted last week in one of the first images of Ukraine’s extraordinary northeastern counteroffensive.

The town – which had a population of 27,000 before the war – is one of a chain of key urban outposts that Ukraine has recaptured over the last week after a sudden collapse of one of Russia’s principal front lines.

On Tuesday, the streets around Balakliia’s main square were eerily quiet. The Ukrainian flag flew above a statue of national poet Taras Shevchenko in front of the regional government building.

A short walk away, regional police officers led reporters to the burial place of two people. The bodies had been exhumed and were laid out on the grass in open body bags.

The two men, they said, were civilians who had been shot dead at a checkpoint in the town on 6 September when the town was still under Russian control. Locals had buried them there because they had nowhere else to do so.

At the site of the exhumed grave, Valentyna, the distressed mother of one of the dead men, 49-year-old Petro, cursed the war and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“No one can return my son to me,” she said.

Speaking in the central square of Balakliia, a crucial military supply hub taken by Ukrainian forces late last week, Ukraine‘s deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar said 150,000 people had been liberated from Russian rule in the area.

Ukrainian flags had been raised and a large crowd gathered to receive bundles of humanitarian aid. A shopping centre had been destroyed but many buildings remained intact, with shops closed and boarded up.

“The aim is to liberate the Kharkiv region and beyond – all the territories occupied by the Russian Federation,” said the minister on the road to Balakliia, which lies 74 km (46 miles) southeast of Kharkiv.

The road to Balakliia through liberated areas was littered with charred vehicles and destroyed military hardware.

Groups of Ukrainian soldiers smoked, grinned and chatted beside the road. One soldier was stretched out on the top of a tank like it was his living room sofa.

In the nearby village of Verbivka, emotional but cheery residents, many of them of retirement age, recounted the fearful existences they led under almost seven months of Russian occupation.

“It was scary: we tried to walk around less, so they’d see us less,” said Tetiana Sinovaz.

Nadia Khvostok, 76, described the traumatic occupation and the arrival of Ukrainian troops, saying residents greeted them “with tears in our eyes”.

There were abandoned Russian vehicles, including a military truck with a smashed windscreen.

US President Joe Biden feels that though Ukraine has made “significant progress” in the war, it is hard to tell if it has reached a turning point.“It’s clear the Ukrainians have made significant progress. But I think it’s going to be a long haul.”

The White House, which has provided billions of dollars of weapons and support, said earlier the US is likely to announce a new military aid package for Ukraine in “coming days”.

Russian forces have left defensive positions, particularly in and around Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, a US spokesperson said.

Since Moscow abandoned its main bastion in the northeast on Saturday, marking its worst defeat since the early days of the war, Ukrainian troops have recaptured dozens of towns in a stunning shift in battleground momentum.

Russian forces still control about a fifth of Ukraine in the south and east, but Kyiv is now on the offensive in both areas.

Ukraine has set its sights on freeing all territory occupied by invading Russian forces after driving them back in a speedy counter-offensive in the northeast.

Around 8,000 sqkm have been liberated by Ukrainian forces so far this month, all in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, said president Volodymyr Zelensky in a Tuesday evening address.

“Stabilisation measures” had been completed in about half of that territory, he said, “and across a liberated area of about the same size, stabilisation measures are still ongoing.”

Reuters was not able to immediately verify the full scope of battlefield successes claimed by Ukraine. The total area cited by Zelenskiy is roughly the size of the Greek island of Crete.

The residents in the newly-liberated areas of Ukraine recounted the incidences of torture by Russian forces during the detention.

Artem, a resident in the city of Balkliya in the Kharki region held by Russian forces for more than 40 days, shared a detailed account of torture and electrocution.

He told BBC that he could hear screams of pain and torure from other cells as well, adding that the occupiers turned of the building noisy ventilation system, so the cried could be heard.

“They made me hold two wires,” he said. “There was an electric generator. The faster it went, the higher the voltage. They said, ‘if you let it go, you are finished’. Then they started asking questions. They said I was lying, and they started spinning it even more and the voltage increased.”

Artem shared, he was detained because they found a picture of his brother in uniform.

Another man said he was held because they found him with Ukrainian flag.

Welcome to The Independent’s live blog for Wednesday, 14 September where we provide the latest update on war in Ukraine.