Russian troops begin raids on two major cities in eastern Ukraine

Ukrainian officials said Russian forces had begun attacks on two major cities in the eastern Donetsk region and continued rocketing and shelling on other Ukrainian cities, including one near Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

The cities of Bakhmut and Avdivka are both considered key targets for Russia’s continued offensive in eastern Ukraine, and analysts say Moscow will need to push ahead in the regional centers of Slovensk and Kramatorsk. Need to capture Bahmut.

“In the direction of Donetsk, the enemy is conducting offensive operations, mainly in the direction of Bakhmut and Avdivka. It uses ground attacks and army aviation,” the Ukrainian General Staff said on Facebook.

Five civilians were killed and 14 others injured in the last day of Russian shelling in the Donetsk region, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on Telegram on Saturday, saying Polish Two people died in Prosny, and one each in Avdivka, Soledal and Pervomayski.

Three civilians were injured after a Russian rocket landed on a residential area in Nikopol, across the Dnieper River from the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region said. The plant has been under Russian control since Moscow’s army captured it early in the war.

“After midnight, Russian troops attacked the Nikopol region with (Soviet-era) Grad rockets and the Kriveri region with barrel artillery,” Valentin Reznichenko wrote on Telegram .

Ukrainian authorities also said a nighttime Russian missile strike damaged unspecified infrastructure in the regional capital Zaporozhye. Russia fired 60 rockets at Nikopol on Thursday, destroying 50 residential buildings in the city of 107,000 and leaving residents without power.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, warned this week that conditions at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant were increasingly dangerous.

He said the plant “violated every principle of nuclear safety”. “The stakes are high, extremely serious and dangerous.”

He expressed concern about the way the factory was run and the danger posed by the fighting around it. Experts at the U.S. Institute of War Research said they believed Russia was intentionally shelling the region to “put Ukraine in a difficult position.”

The Ukrainian company that operates the plant said on Saturday that Russian troops were using the plant’s basement to escape Ukrainian shelling and barred its Ukrainian employees from going there.

“Ukrainian personnel do not yet have access to these sites, so in the event of new shelling, people will have nowhere to hide and are at risk,” Ukrainian state-run Enerhoatom said on its Telegram channel.

Enerhoatom said Friday that Russian rockets damaged the plant’s facilities, including nitrogen oxygen units and high-voltage power lines. Local Russian-appointed officials acknowledged the damage but blamed it on the so-called Ukrainian shelling.

Two civilians were seriously injured Saturday in southern Ukraine after Russian forces fired rockets at the Black Sea port of Mykolayiv before dawn, according to regional authorities. This was followed by an attack on Mykolayiv on Friday afternoon, which left one dead and 21 injured.

In the north, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and its environs were also hit again overnight by Russian rockets, according to regional governor Oleh Syniehubov. An 18-year-old man in Chuhuiv, a small town near Kharkov, had to be taken to hospital on Saturday after picking up an unexploded shell.

Due to their proximity to the Russian border, both Chuviv and Kharkiv have come under sustained Russian shelling in recent weeks.

Near-constant artillery and missile strikes also occurred in the neighboring area of ​​Sumy, which borders Russia. Its regional governor said Saturday that the province had been hit by Russian soil more than 60 times the previous day, and a wounded civilian had to be hospitalized.

In terms of ammunition, Russia has started using Iranian combat drones in the war, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksi Arestovich said in a YouTube speech, adding that Tehran had handed over 46 drones to the Russian army.