By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Monday its forces had thwarted a major Ukrainian offensive at five points along the front in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk and killed hundreds of troops while Ukraine accused Moscow of spreading lies.

It was not immediately clear whether or not the attack represented the start of a Ukrainian counteroffensive which Kyiv has been promising for months to drive out Russian forces after the invasion of February 2022.

Russia's defense ministry said Ukraine had attacked on Sunday morning with six mechanized and two tank battalions in southern Donetsk, where Moscow has long suspected Ukraine would seek to drive a wedge through Russian-controlled territory.

"On the morning of June 4, the enemy launched a large-scale offensive in five sectors of the front in the South Donetsk direction," the defence ministry said in a statement posted on Telegram at 1:30 a.m. Moscow time (2230 GMT).

"The enemy's goal was to break through our defences in the most vulnerable, in its opinion, sector of the front," it said. "The enemy did not achieve its tasks, it had no success."

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the Russian statement and the Ukrainian defence ministry and military did not immediately respond to written requests for comment.

The commander of Ukraine's ground forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Monday that Ukrainian forces continued "moving forward" near the long-contested city of Bakhmut in northern Donetsk. He made no comment on the counter-offensive.

The daily report from Ukraine's General Staff said only that there were 29 combat clashes in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications did not address the Russian statement directly but said, without providing evidence, that Russia would seek to spread lies.

"To demoralize Ukrainians and mislead the community (including their own population), Russian propagandists will spread false information about the counteroffensive, its directions, and the losses of the Ukrainian army," it said.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov published a cryptic message on Twitter on Sunday, quoting Depeche Mode's track "Enjoy the Silence".

Russian war bloggers reported fighting at several points across the front, particularly around Vuhledar, some 150 km (93 miles) southwest of Bakhmut.

FIGHTING

Russia's defence ministry released video of what it said showed several Ukrainian armoured vehicles in a field blowing up after being hit.

Russian forces killed 250 Ukrainian troops as well as destroying 16 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 21 armoured combat vehicles, the ministry said.

Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who is in charge of Moscow's military operation in Ukraine, was in the area at the time of the Ukrainian attack, the ministry said.

Prominent Russian military blogger Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the name War Gonzo, said Ukrainian forces were attacking near Velyka Novosilka, a village west of Vuhledar.

"There is a tough fight going on."

Other Russian military bloggers reported also heavy fighting on Monday morning near Bakhmut, nearby Soledar and Vuhledar. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.

Counter-Offensive Beginning?

For months, Ukraine has been preparing for a counter-offensive against Russian forces which officials in Kyiv and CIA Director William Burns have said will pierce Russian President Vladimir Putin's hubris.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Saturday that he was ready to launch the counteroffensive but tempered a forecast of success with a warning that it could take some time and come at a heavy cost.

"I don't know how long it will take," he told the Journal. "To be honest, it can go a variety of ways, completely different. But we are going to do it, and we are ready."

After seeking tens of billions of dollars of Western weapons to fight Russian forces, the success or failure of the counter-offensive is likely to influence the shape of future Western diplomatic and military support for Ukraine.

Ukraine has in recent weeks sought to weaken Russian positions but its specific plans have been shrouded in secrecy as it seeks to strike yet another blow against the much larger military of Russia.

Moscow was last month struck by drones which Russia said was a Ukrainian terrorist attack while pro-Ukrainian forces have repeatedly crossed into Russia proper in recent days in the Belgorod region.

After a two-month lull, Russia has launched hundreds of drones and missiles on Ukraine since early May, chiefly on Kyiv, with Ukraine saying it was targeting military facilities but also hitting residential areas.

WAR IN UKRAINE

Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24 last year in what the Kremlin expected to be swift operation but its forces suffered a series of defeats and had to move back and regroup in swathes of eastern Ukraine.

Russia now controls at least 18% of what is internationally recognized to be Ukrainian territory, and has claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory.

For months, tens of thousands of Russian troops have been digging in along a front line which stretches for around 600 miles (1,000km), bracing for a Ukrainian attack which is expected to try to cut Russia's so-called land bridge to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.

Ukraine vows to eject every last Russian soldier from its territory, and casts the invasion as an imperial-style land grab by Russia.

Russia says the West is fighting a hybrid war against Russia to sow discord and ultimately carve up Russia's vast natural resources, allegations that Western leaders deny.

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow, Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; editing by Diane Craft, Lincoln Feast and Philippa Fletcher)

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kevin McCarthy secured his position as Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday night, navigating fierce hardline opposition in his own caucus to pass a debt ceiling bill containing federal spending limits that President Joe Biden for months vowed to resist.

Six months after he endured 15 humiliating floor votes just to be elected speaker, McCarthy proved capable of dragging Biden into negotiations over spending and other Republican priorities, and then marshalling two-thirds of his often fractious House Republican majority to enact bipartisan legislation.

"It's not how you start, it's how you finish," McCarthy told reporters after the vote, repeating one of his comments from the January night he was finally confirmed as speaker. The House approved by a 314-117 margin the bill, which lifts the government's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in exchange for cutting non-defense discretionary spending and stiffening work requirements in assistance programs.

Yet it was a bruising victory for McCarthy. The bill gained 165 votes from Democrats, outnumbering the 149 from members of McCarthy's own Republican party.

The bill now goes to the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, which must enact it and get it to Biden's desk by June 5 to avoid a crippling U.S. default.

Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson, a McCarthy ally who helped craft the Republican debt-ceiling legislation that buttressed the speaker in negotiations, said the vote proved wrong Democratic predications that the 58-year-old Californian would have little chance of holding his caucus together.

"They said he would never become speaker, and of course they were wrong. They said he would never be able to manage the floor effectively and we haven't had a single bill fail," Johnson said in an interview. "They said he wouldn't be able to cut a deal with the president, and they were wrong about that."

McCarthy has so far succeeded in passing the bill without drawing direct verbal attacks from former President Donald Trump, who urged Republicans to push for a default if they were not able to extract sufficient concessions from Democrats.

Trump, who is seeking a return to the White House in 2024, had blasted top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling during Biden's first year in office. McConnell largely stayed in the background during these talks, which began to move forward after Biden agreed to one-on-one negotiations on May 9.

Avoiding Trump's ire appears to have protected McCarthy's standing with Republican voters nationally, some 44% of whom told a Reuters/Ipsos poll in May that they approve of his job performance, notably higher than McConnell's 29% approval rate.

The bill approved by the House on Wednesday would suspend the debt limit - essentially meaning that it no longer applies - through Jan. 1, 2025. That sets the stage for another showdown in the weeks following the 2024 presidential election.

Republican lawmakers and analysts say McCarthy's masterstroke in getting Biden to the negotiating table was his decision to bring a debt ceiling bill to the floor and pass it in April with only the support of his own party members.

Up to that point, Biden had refused McCarthy's requests to negotiate over the debt ceiling, insisting that House Republicans enact their own budget for fiscal 2024 as a prerequisite for spending talks.

But in getting the April measure passed, House Republicans became the only body in Washington that had acted to raise the debt ceiling.

"Once the House passed a bill, 'no negotiations' was a clearly unsustainable place to be," said Rohit Kumar, a former top aide to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell who is now co-leader of PwC's national tax office in Washington.

The White House, for its part, contends that the talks between Biden and McCarthy were not a negotiation on the debt ceiling.

"The debt ceiling had to be lifted, and it had to be lifted for a long period of time," White House budget director Shalanda Young told a Tuesday press conference. "You see this bill lift the debt ceiling until 2025. You can call it a negotiation; I call it a declarative statement."

House Republicans say McCarthy has succeeded as speaker, because of an inclusive leadership style, cultivating support from a majority of caucus members by working through major party caucuses, known as the "Five Families," a reference to the warring organized crime clans of The Godfather movie.

"Speaker McCarthy's done an incredible job," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. "And I think he's proved over and over again that he defies the odds, and he also defies people's expectations."

McCarthy also expanded his influence through trusted friends and longtime associates such as Reps. Patrick McHenry and Garret Graves, who became his lead negotiators with the White House.

But McCarthy is not quite out of the woods. After stirring the ire of far rightists who decried the compromise bill as a sellout, he could face the prospect of ouster at the hands of any single member.

One of the conditions he agreed to in January to win the speakership was allowing for any one member to call for a "motion to vacate the chair," in essence a vote on whether to depose the speaker.

Senior members of the Freedom Caucus have said they would consider next steps in coming weeks.

One of their number, Ralph Norman, said McCarthy should have forced Democrats to accept the House-passed bill.

"I think it weakens him. Whether it's permanent or temporary, I don't know," Norman said.

But Norman said he would not support an immediate effort to oust McCarthy as speaker, adding "To threaten to kick him out now, that's not right."

A similar threat triggered the resignation of former House Speaker John Boehner in 2015.

"This is where the honeymoon can definitely end," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, a one-time aide to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Asked this week whether he expects to keep his speakership, McCarthy told a reporter: "What do you think? You guys ask me all the time, and I'm still standing."

His allies say they will defend him against any potential threat to his position.

"We'll have to deal with the internal politics of a hard-fought fight. Tempers are short and emotions are raw right now. But we'll deal with it," Representative Kelly Armstrong, a McCarthy adviser, told Reuters.

(Reporting by David Morgan, additional reporting by Steve Holland and Jason Lange; Editing by Scott Malone and Suzanne Goldenberg)

By Moira Warburton, Katharine Jackson and Gram Slattery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After tough negotiations to reach a tentative deal with the White House on the U.S. borrowing limit, the next challenge for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is pushing it through the House, where it may be opposed by both hardline Republicans and progressive Democrats.

As Democratic and Republican negotiators iron out the final details of an agreement to suspend the federal government's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in coming days, McCarthy may be forced to do some behind-the-scenes wrangling.

A failure by Congress to deal with its self-imposed debt ceiling before June 5 could trigger a default that would shake financial markets and send the United States into a deep recession.

Republicans control the House by 222-213, while Democrats control the Senate by 51-49. These margins mean that moderates from both sides will have to support the bill, as any compromise will almost definitely lose the support of the far left and far right wings of each party.

To win the speaker's gavel, McCarthy agreed to enable any single member to call for a vote to unseat him, which could lead to his ouster if he seeks to work with Democrats.

Hours before the deal was announced, some hardline Republicans balked at McCarthy cooperating with the White House.

"If Speaker's negotiators bring back in substance a clean debt limit increase ... one so large that it even protects Biden from the issue in the presidential ..., it's war," Representative Dan Bishop, a Freedom Caucus member, tweeted.

The deal does just that, sources briefed on it say: it suspends the debt ceiling until January 2025, after the November 2024 presidential election, in exchange for caps on spending and cuts in government programs.

Bishop and other hardline Republicans were sharply critical of early deal details that suggest Biden has pushed back successfully on several cost-cutting demands on Saturday, signaling McCarthy may have an issue getting votes.

"Utter capitulation in progress. By the side holding the cards," Bishop said.

Progressive Democrats in both chambers have said they would not support any deal that has additional work requirements. This deal does, sources say, adding work requirements to food aid for people aged 50 to 54.

The deal would boost spending on the military and veterans' care, and cap it for many discretionary domestic programs, according to sources familiar with the talks. But Republicans and Democrats will need to battle over which ones in the months to come, as the deal doesn't specify them.

Republicans have rejected Biden's proposed tax increases, and neither side has shown a willingness to take on the fast-growing health and retirement programs that will drive up debt sharply in the coming years.

Several credit-rating agencies have said they have put the United States on review for a possible downgrade, which would push up borrowing costs and undercut its standing as the backbone of the global financial system.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Editing by Heather Timmons and Kim Coghill)