Ukraine strikes key bridge as Russia shells in east
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 main Ukrainian-held ones in Donetsk province, the focus of an ongoing Russian offensive to capture eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
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.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also claimed that Russian strikes near Kramatorsk, 75 miles north of Donetsk city, destroyed a U.S.-supplied multiple rocket launcher and ammunition.
Ukrainian authorities said Russian missile strikes Friday on Kramatorsk had destroyed 20 residential buildings.
Neither claim could be independently verified.
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.
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.