Russian forces bomb residential areas in Ukraine

Russian forces attacked residential areas across Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday, as Ukrainian troops launched a counteroffensive to try to retake the occupied southern region, hitting the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-occupied Kherson region.

A Russian rocket attack on the city of Kramatorsk on Friday killed three people and injured 13 others, according to the mayor.

Kramatorsk is the headquarters of the Ukrainian army in the country’s war-torn east.

The attack came less than a day after 11 other rockets hit the city, one of two major Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk province, where Russia is in the midst of its assault on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The focus of the offensive.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed Saturday that its forces had taken control of Piski, a village on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital that pro-Moscow separatists have claimed since 2014.

Russian troops and Kremlin-backed rebels are seeking to seize Ukrainian-held areas north and west of the city of Donetsk to expand the separatist self-proclaimed republic.

But the Ukrainian military said Saturday that its forces blocked an overnight advance towards the smaller cities of Avdivka and Bakhmut.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also claimed that a Russian attack near Kramatorsk, 75 miles north of the city of Donetsk, destroyed U.S.-supplied multiple rocket launchers and ammunition .

Ukrainian authorities have not acknowledged any military losses but said a Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk on Friday destroyed 20 residential buildings.

Neither claim could be independently verified.

The Ukrainian governor of neighbouring Luhansk province, which was part of fighting in the Donbas region and was occupied by Russian troops last month, claimed that Ukrainian troops still controlled a small area.

Serhii Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, wrote on Telegram that the defenders remained in hiding inside an oil refinery on the edge of the city of Lysychansk, which Moscow claims to have taken, and controlled an area near a village.

“The enemy is burning the land at the entrance to the Luhansk region because it cannot overcome (Ukrainian resistance along the route) these few kilometers,” Khadai said.

“It is difficult to calculate how many shells this free Luhansk region has withstood over the past month and a half.”

Further west, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region reported more Russian shelling of the city of Nikopol, on the other side of the Dnieper River, from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

Governor Yevtushenko did not specify whether Russian troops fired on Nikopol from the occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

There were no casualties, but damage to residential buildings, power lines and gas pipelines, he wrote on Telegram on Saturday.

He said Nikopol had been bombed every day for most of the past week, with a barrage of shelling on Thursday killing three people and damaging 40 apartment buildings.

Russian and Ukrainian officials have for days accused each other of violating nuclear safety rules by shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

Russian troops have occupied the plant since the early days of the Moscow invasion, although pre-war Ukrainian nuclear workers at the facility continue to run it.

Russian troops shelled the factory from a village several miles away, damaging its pumping station and fire station, Ukrainian military intelligence said Saturday.

The intelligence agency said the Russians used buses to bring people into the power plant and hoisted Ukrainian flags on self-propelled artillery guns on the outskirts of Enerhodar, the city where the power plant is located.

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that Russian troops cynically used the plant as a shield when they opened fire on communities across the river, knowing that Ukrainian troops were unlikely to fire back for fear of a nuclear accident.

For weeks, the Ukrainian military has been trying to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive to retake the Russian-occupied Kherson region in southern Ukraine.

A Ukrainian strike has damaged the last working bridge over the Dnieper River in the region and further weakened Russian supply lines, a local Ukrainian official reported Saturday.

“The Russians are no longer able to fully hand over their equipment,” Serhii Khlan, a representative of the Kherson Regional Council, wrote on Facebook.