Russia’s military said it was able to hit residential areas across Ukraine overnight, and Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive to try to retake the occupied southern region, striking the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-occupied Kherson region, Ukrainian officials said. authorities on Saturday.
A Russian rocket attack on Kramatorsk killed three people and wounded 13 on Friday night, according to the mayor. The city is the headquarters of Ukrainian forces in the war-torn east.
The attack came less than a day after 11 other rockets were fired at the city, one of two main Ukrainian-held areas in Donetsk province, the focus of Russia’s offensive to retake the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
A crater from Friday night’s missile attack is seen next to damaged homes in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Saturday. (David Goldman/Associated Press)
Russia’s defense ministry said on Saturday that its forces had taken control of Pisky, a village on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital claimed by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.
But Ukraine’s military command later said in a Facebook post that “fierce fighting continues” in the area.
Ukraine claims that an advance on 2 small towns has been prevented
Russian troops and Kremlin-backed rebels are seeking to seize Ukrainian-held areas north and west of the city of Donetsk to expand the separatists’ self-proclaimed republic.
But the Ukrainian military said on Saturday that its forces had prevented an overnight advance on the smaller towns of Avdiivka and Bakhmut.
A local resident rides a bicycle past a missile fragment embedded in the ground after a rocket attack in the city of Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Friday. (Anataloi Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also claimed that Russian strikes near Kramatorsk, 120 kilometers north of the city of Donetsk, destroyed a US-supplied salvo fire system and ammunition. Ukrainian officials have not acknowledged any military casualties, but said Friday’s Russian missile strikes on Kramatorsk destroyed 20 residential buildings.
Neither claim can be independently verified.
The Ukrainian governor of neighboring Luhansk province, which is part of the battle for the Donbass region and was captured by Russian forces last month, says Ukrainian troops still hold a small area.
Writing on Telegram, Luhansk Governor Serhii Haidai said the defending troops remained holed up in an oil refinery on the outskirts of Lisichansk, a town Moscow claims had been taken, and also controlled areas near a village.
A Ukrainian soldier prepares to fire a howitzer near a front line in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region on Saturday. (Alexander Ratushniak/Reuters)
“The enemy is burning the ground at the entrances to Luhansk region because they cannot overcome (Ukrainian resistance) these few kilometers,” Haydai said. “It is difficult to count how many thousands of projectiles this territory of the free Luhansk region has withstood in the last month and a half.
Shelling was reported in Nikopol
Further west, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk region reported new Russian shelling of Nikopol, a city across the Dnieper River from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko did not specify whether Russian troops shelled Nikopol from the occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. He wrote on Telegram on Saturday that there were no casualties, but residential buildings, a power line and a gas line were damaged.
Ukrainian soldiers carry the coffin of a fellow soldier during a funeral at the Bucha cemetery in the Kyiv region on Saturday. (Dimitar Dilkov/AFP/Getty Images)
Nikopol has come under daily bombardment for most of the past week, and a volley of shells killed three people and damaged 40 residential buildings on Thursday, Yevtushenko said.
Russian and Ukrainian officials have accused each other for days of shelling the Zaporozhye plant in violation of nuclear safety rules. Russian troops have occupied the plant since the early days of Moscow’s invasion, although pre-war Ukrainian nuclear workers continue to operate it.
Ukrainian military intelligence said on Saturday that Russian troops shelled the plant from a village just kilometers away, damaging the plant’s pumping station and a fire station. The intelligence directorate said the Russians bused people into the power plant and mounted a Ukrainian flag on a self-propelled gun on the outskirts of Enerhodar, the town where the plant is located.
“Obviously, it will be used for another provocation to accuse the armed forces of Ukraine,” the directorate said, without giving details.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that Russian forces cynically used the plant as a shield while firing on communities across the river, knowing that Ukrainian forces were unlikely to return fire for fear of triggering a nuclear incident.
They said Russian shelling on Friday night killed one woman and wounded two other civilians in the city of Zaporizhia, which is about 53 kilometers from the plant. Ukraine’s South Mykolaiv region also reported that a woman was killed in shelling there.
For several weeks, the Ukrainian army has reportedly been trying to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive to retake the Russian-occupied Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
Utility workers work in a crater after a missile hit Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on Saturday during the Russian invasion. (AFP/Getty Images)
A local Ukrainian official said Saturday that a Ukrainian strike had damaged the last working bridge over the Dnieper River in the region and further crippled Russian supplies.
“The Russians no longer have any ability to fully hand over their equipment,” wrote Sergii Khlan, a deputy of the Kherson regional council, on Facebook. His claims could not be immediately confirmed.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that damage to the bridges across the Dnieper meant that “land supply for several thousand Russian troops on the west bank is almost certainly dependent on only two pontoon ferry crossings”.
“Even if Russia manages to make significant repairs to [damaged] bridges, they will remain a key vulnerability,” the ministry said.
Residents are urged not to post about military action
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly mentioned a planned counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied parts of the country’s south. They urged residents not to post information on social media about hostilities related to this and warned that any related messages may come with a delay in time.
A child walks in Kramatorsk on Saturday along a street where homes were damaged hours earlier by a Russian missile attack. (David Goldman/Associated Press)
Days after explosions at a Russian airbase in Crimea destroyed up to a dozen planes, an adviser to Ukraine’s president said Kyiv should make retaking the Black Sea peninsula, which Moscow captured more than eight years ago, one of its military objectives.
“Russia started a war against Ukraine and the world in 2014 with its brazen seizure of Crimea. It is obvious that this war must end with the liberation of Crimea,” Mykhailo Podoilak, chief of staff of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
Ukrainian authorities have not claimed responsibility for the explosions at the Saki air base on Tuesday. Russian defense officials denied that any planes were damaged or that there had been any attack, and attributed the explosions to sparks from field munitions.
Add Comment