Russian shelling heavy in east as Ukraine strikes key bridge
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s military pounded residential areas across Ukraine overnight, claiming gains, as Ukrainian forces pressed a counteroffensive to try to take back an occupied southern region, striking the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-occupied Kherson region, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday.
A Russian rocket attack on the city of Kramatorsk killed three people and wounded 13 others Friday night, according to the mayor. Kramatorsk is the headquarters for Ukrainian forces in the country’s war-torn east.
The attack came less than a day after 11 other rockets were fired at the city, one of the two remaining Ukrainian-held ones in Donetsk province, the focus of an ongoing Russian offensive to capture eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Saturday its forces had taken control of Pisky, a village on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital that pro-Moscow separatists have controlled since 2014.
Russian troops and the Kremlin-backed rebels are trying 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 Saturday that its forces had prevented an overnight advance toward the smaller cities of Avdiivka and Bakhmut.
For several weeks, Ukraine’s military has tried to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive to reclaim southern Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Kherson region. A local Ukrainian official reported Saturday that a Ukrainian strike had damaged the last working bridge over the Dnieper River in the region, further crippling Russian supply lines.
“The Russians no longer have any capability to fully turn over their equipment,” Serhii Khlan, a deputy to the Kherson Regional Council, wrote on Facebook.
The British Defense Ministry said Saturday that damage to bridges across the Dnieper means that “ground resupply for the several thousand Russian troops on the west bank is almost certainly reliant on just two pontoon ferry crossing points.”
“Even if Russia manages to make significant repairs to the (damaged) bridges, they will remain a key vulnerability,” the British said.
Days after explosions at a Russian air base in Crimea destroyed up to a dozen aircraft, a Ukrainian presidential adviser said Kyiv should make retaking the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014 one of its goals of the war.
“Russia started a war against Ukraine and the world in 2014, with its brazen seizure of Crimea. It is obvious that this war should end with the liberation of Crimea,” Mykhailo Podoylak, the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, wrote Saturday on Twitter.