The Russian military pounded residential areas across Ukraine overnight, claiming gains as Ukrainian forces pressed a counter-offensive to try to retake a held southern region, knocking out the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-held Kherson region, Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday. Three people were killed by a Russian rocket attack in the city of Kramatorsk and 13 others were injured on Friday night, according to the mayor. Kramatorsk is the headquarters of Ukrainian forces in the war-torn east of the country. The attack came less than a day after another 11 rockets were fired into the city, one of two main Ukrainian-controlled rocket ranges in Donetsk province, at the heart of an ongoing Russian offensive to seize eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Russia’s defense ministry said on Saturday its forces had taken control of Pisky, a village on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, the capital of the province that pro-Moscow separatists have controlled since 2014. Russian troops and 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. However, the Ukrainian military said on Saturday that its forces had foiled an overnight advance on the smaller towns of Avdiivka and Bakhmut. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also claimed that Russian raids near Kramatorsk, 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the city of Donetsk, destroyed a multiple rocket launcher and US-supplied ammunition. Ukrainian authorities did not acknowledge any military casualties, but said Russian missile attacks on Friday in Kramatorsk destroyed 20 residential buildings. Neither claim could be independently verified. The Ukrainian governor of neighboring Luhansk province, part of the Donbas region seized by Russian forces last month, claimed that Ukrainian troops still hold a small area in the province. Writing on Telegram, Luhansk Governor Serhii Haidai said the defending soldiers were holed up inside an oil refinery on the edge of Lysychansk, a town Moscow claimed it had captured, and were also controlling areas near a village. “The enemy is burning the ground at the entrances to the Luhansk region because they cannot overcome (Ukrainian resistance along) these few kilometers,” Haidai said. “It’s hard to count how many thousands of shells this area of the Luhansk Free Zone has endured over the past month and a half.” Further west, the Governor of Dnipropetrovsk region reported more Russian shelling of the city of Nikopol, which is across the Dnieper River from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Governor Yevhen Yevtushenko did not specify whether Russian troops had fired on Nikopol from the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Writing on Telegram, he said on Saturday that there were no casualties, but residential buildings, a power line and a natural gas pipeline were damaged. Nicopolis has been under daily shelling for most of the past week, and a volley of shells killed three people and damaged 40 apartment buildings on Thursday, he said. Russia and Ukrainian officials accuse each other of bombing the Zaporizhia plant in violation of nuclear safety rules. Russian troops have occupied the plant since the early days of Moscow’s invasion, although the facility’s Ukrainian nuclear workers continue to operate it. Ukrainian military intelligence claimed on Saturday that Russian troops were shelling the plant from a village just kilometers away, damaging a pump station and a fire station. The Intelligence Directorate said the Russians had taken people to the power plant and placed a Ukrainian flag on a gun on the outskirts of Enerhodar, the town where the plant is located. “Apparently, it will be used for another provocation to blame the armed forces of Ukraine,” the directorate said, without elaborating. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that Russian forces were using the plant as a shield while firing on Ukrainian communities across the river, knowing that Ukrainian forces were unlikely to retaliate for fear of a nuclear accident. They said Russian shelling on Friday night killed one woman and wounded two other civilians in the city of Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s southern Mykolayiv region also said a woman was killed there by shelling. For several weeks, Ukraine’s military has been trying to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive to retake the Russian-held Kherson region of southern Ukraine. A local Ukrainian official said Saturday that a Ukrainian attack destroyed the last working bridge over the Dnieper River in the region, further crippling Russian supply lines. “The Russians no longer have any possibility to fully surrender their equipment,” wrote Serhii Khlan, a deputy in the Kherson regional council, on Facebook. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that damage to bridges along the Dnieper meant that “land supply for the many thousands of Russian troops on the west bank is almost certainly dependent on just two ferry crossings”. “Even if Russia manages to make significant repairs to the (damaged) bridges, they will remain a key vulnerability,” the British said. On Saturday, the deputy director of the Russian-controlled Kakhovka hydroelectric plant 60 kilometers above the city of Kherson said one of its generating units was out of service after a Ukrainian missile attack. Arseniy Zelensky said further strikes could endanger the Zaporizhia nuclear plant because its water intakes use the reservoir formed by the Kakhovka plant’s dam. Days after explosions at a Russian airbase in Crimea destroyed up to a dozen aircraft, an adviser to Ukraine’s president said Kyiv should make retaking the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 one of its war aims. “Russia launched a war against Ukraine and the world in 2014 with its brazen seizure of Crimea. It is obvious that this war must end with the liberation of Crimea,” Mykhailo Podoylak, chief of staff of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted on Saturday. “And also with the legal punishment of the initiators of the ‘special military operation’” – the Kremlin’s term for the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s explosions at the Saki air base in Crimea. Russian defense officials denied that the aircraft was damaged – or that any attack had taken place – attributing the blasts to exploding munitions.
