KYIV: Ukraine said on Friday that Russian forces were concentrating their firepower on the Pokrovsk front in the eastern Donetsk region, where overnight strikes wounded at least six people.
The Kremlin annexed the industrial territory in late 2022, months after invading, and its forces are making incremental gains there.
“The Pokrovsk front... is the most intense in terms of enemy attacks,” the Ukrainian military said in a briefing.
In the war-battered town of Selydove near the front line in Donetsk, officials said six people were wounded by Russian aerial attacks overnight.
AFP journalists on the scene hours after the attack saw the interior of a supermarket reduced to heaps of metal and glass under a partially gutted roof.
The force of the explosion, which tore open a neighboring building, also blew out the windows of residential buildings across the street.
Oleg, a 57-year-old resident, said he heard a strange noise at around 9.00 p.m. on Thursday evening.
He thought it was several helicopters flying overhead, until he saw the explosion.
Lyudmila, still in shock, assessed the damage in her flat where the windows had been blown out by the blast.
“Everything was blown away,” the 68-year-old told AFP, her face bruised by the blast.
Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight and during the day Friday.
The two sides have stepped up cross-border aerial assaults in recent weeks, Kyiv targeting Russian energy facilities and Moscow launching retaliatory barrages.
The governor of Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said seven people were wounded when shelling caused a section of a five-story block of flats to collapse in the border town of Shebekino, which often comes under attack from the Ukrainian side.
Emergency services said rescuers were still searching through the rubble.
Russia said it had downed 87 Ukrainian drones, 70 of which had targeted the southern Rostov region that houses the headquarters of its military operation against Ukraine.
The defense ministry said 70 drones were downed over Rostov, six each over Kursk and Voronezh, two each over Volgograd and the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, and one over the annexed Crimean peninsula.
Attacks sparked power cuts in several areas of the Rostov region, its governor Vasily Golubev said on social media.
In the Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine, a fuel reservoir was slightly damaged by falling debris, its governor Alexander Gusev said.
Kyiv meanwhile said that Ukrainian air-defense systems had downed 24 out of 31 Russian drones and missiles fired overnight.
During the day, drone attacks killed a 54-year-old man in the southern Kherson region and wounded a 17-year-old girl in the eastern city of Dnipro, regional authorities said.
Three people were wounded in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes were damaged in the neighboring Kharkiv region.
Ukraine fighting ‘intense’ battles in Donetsk region
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Ukraine fighting ‘intense’ battles in Donetsk region
- “The Pokrovsk front... is the most intense in terms of enemy attacks,” the Ukrainian military said
- In the war-battered town of Selydove near the front line in Donetsk, officials said six people were wounded by Russian aerial attacks overnight
Russia slams Western peacekeeping plan for Ukraine
- “The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Zakharova
- She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive“
MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday slammed a plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine as “dangerous” and dubbed Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war,” dousing hopes the plan could be a step toward ending the almost four-year-war.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing the warring sides to strike a deal to halt the conflict, running shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a bid to get an agreement across the line.
An initial 28-point plan which largely adhered to Moscow’s demands was criticized by Kyiv and Europe, and now Russia has slammed the attempts to beef-up protections for Ukraine should an elusive deal be reached.
Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week, including a peacekeeping force.
But in its first comments since the summit, Moscow said the statements were far away from anything the Kremlin could accept to end its assault.
“The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
She called the plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies “dangerous” and “destructive.”
The remarks come as Russian strikes plunged hundreds of thousands in Ukraine into darkness, leaving families without heat in below-freezing temperatures — attacks that Zelensky said showed Russia was still set on war.
- ‘Legitimate military targets’ -
European leaders and US envoys announced earlier this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed when the fighting stops.
But Moscow has repeatedly warned that it would not accept any NATO members sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Zakharova said Thursday, repeating a threat previously uttered by Putin.
Zelensky also said Thursday that a bilateral agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalization at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.
Kyiv says legally-binding assurances that its allies would come to its defense are essential to convince Russia not to re-attack if a ceasefire is reached.
But specific details on the guarantees, the European force, and how it would engage have not been made public.
Zelensky said earlier this week he was yet to receive an “unequivocal” answer of what they would do if Russia does attack again after a deal.
Zelensky has also said that the most difficult questions in any settlement — territorial control of the eastern Donbas region and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — were still unresolved.
- Russian strikes cut heating -
Ukraine was meanwhile scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households after a new barrage targeted energy facilities in its Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipropetrovsk’s capital Dnipro, said on Telegram.
He announced power was “gradually returning to the hospitals” after the blackouts forced them to run on generators. The city authorities also extended school holidays for children.
About 600,000 households in the region remained cut off from power in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said.
In a post on social media, Zelensky said the attacks “clearly don’t indicate that Moscow is reconsidering its priorities.”
In addition to the unrelenting pummelling of Dnipropetrovsk, Russia pressed on with its ground assault on the region, claiming to have taken another village there.
It is not one of the five Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
