Russian shelling storms residential areas in the east; Ukraine strikes key bridge #Russian #shelling #pound #residential areas #eastern #Ukraine #strikes #key #bridge Welcome to OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
The Russian army slammed into residential areas across Ukraine at night, claiming gains when Ukrainian forces launched a counter-offensive to attempt to take back an occupied southern region, hitting the last working bridge over a river in the Russian-occupied Kherson region. the Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday.
Three people were killed and 13 others injured in a Russian rocket attack on the city of Kramatorsk on Friday evening, the mayor said. Kramatorsk is the headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the war-torn east of the country.
The attack came less than a day after 11 other rockets were fired at the city, one of the two main Ukrainian-occupied cities in Donetsk province, the center of an ongoing Russian offensive to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
A Ukrainian soldier stands next to a D-30 howitzer near a front line in the Mykolaiv region as the Russian attack on Ukraine continues on August 13, 2022.
STRINGER / REUTERS
Russia’s defense ministry claimed on Saturday that its forces had taken control of Pisky, a village on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital claimed by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.
Russian forces and Kremlin-backed rebels are trying to take Ukrainian-occupied areas north and west of the city of Donetsk to expand the separatist self-proclaimed republic. But the Ukrainian army said on Saturday that its forces had prevented a nighttime advance into the smaller towns of Avdiivka and Bakhmut.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also claimed that Russian attacks near Kramatorsk, 120 kilometers north of the city of Donetsk, destroyed a US-supplied multiple rocket launcher and ammunition. Ukrainian authorities did not acknowledge military losses, but said Russian rocket attacks on Kramatorsk had destroyed 20 residential buildings on Friday.
Neither claim could be independently verified.
The Ukrainian governor of neighboring Luhansk province, part of the battle for the Donbas region and overrun by Russian forces last month, claimed Ukrainian forces still controlled a small area. In Telegram, Luhansk Governor Serhii Haidai wrote that the defending forces were holed up in an oil refinery on the outskirts of Lysychansk, a city Moscow claimed to have taken, and also control areas near a village.
“The enemy is setting fire to the ground at the entrances to the Luhansk region because it cannot overcome these few kilometers (Ukrainian resistance),” Haidai said. “It is difficult to count how many thousands of shells this area of the free Luhansk region has endured in the past month and a half.”
Further west, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region reported more Russian shelling of the city of Nikopol, which sits across the Dnieper River from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Governor Yevhen Yevtushenko did not specify whether Russian troops had fired at Nikopol from the occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. He wrote on Telegram on Saturday that there were no casualties, but that residential buildings, a power line and a gas pipeline were damaged.
Nikopol has been subjected to daily bombing raids for most of the past week, and a salvo of shells killed three people and damaged 40 apartment buildings on Thursday, he said.
Russian and Ukrainian officials have been accusing each other for days of shelling the Zaporizhzhya plant in violation of nuclear safety rules. Russian forces have occupied the factory since the early days of the Moscow invasion, although the factory’s pre-war Ukrainian nuclear workers continue to run the factory.
Ukrainian military intelligence claimed on Saturday that Russian troops fired on the factory from a village just a few miles away, damaging a gas station and fire station. The intelligence directorate said the Russians had taken people to the power plant and mounted a Ukrainian flag on a self-propelled gun on the outskirts of Enerhodar, the city where the plant is located.
“Clearly it will be used for yet another provocation to incriminate Ukraine’s armed forces,” the directorate said without elaborating.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that Russian forces cynically used the plant as a shield while firing on communities across the river, knowing Ukrainian troops were unlikely to fire back for fear of a nuclear accident.
They said Russian shelling on Friday night killed a woman and injured two other civilians in the town of Zaporizhzhya, a straight distance of about 53 kilometers (33 miles) from the factory. Ukraine’s southern Mykolayiv region also said a woman was killed in shelling there.
The Ukrainian military has spent weeks trying to lay the groundwork for a counter-offensive to retake the Russian-occupied Kherson region of southern Ukraine. A local Ukrainian official reported on Saturday that a Ukrainian strike had damaged the last working bridge over the Dnieper River in the region and further paralyzed Russian supply lines.
“The Russians no longer have the option of fully handing over their equipment,” Serhii Khlan, a deputy for the Kherson Regional Council, wrote on Facebook. His claims could not be immediately verified.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly reported a planned counter-offensive to retake Russian-occupied parts of the south of the country. They urged residents not to post information on social media about military actions related to it and warned that any related announcements could come with some delay.
Days after explosions at a Russian air base in Crimea destroyed up to a dozen planes, a Ukrainian presidential adviser said Kiev should make the recapture of the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow occupied more than eight years ago one of its war goals.
“Russia started a war against Ukraine and the world in 2014, with the brutal seizure of Crimea. It is clear that this war must end with the liberation of Crimea,” Mykhailo Podoylak, the head of the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “And also with the legal punishment of the initiators of the ‘special military operation’” – the Kremlin’s term for its war in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have not claimed responsibility for the explosions at Saki Air Force Base on Tuesday. Russian defense officials denied that planes had been damaged — or that an attack was taking place — and attributed the blast to sparking ammunition at the scene.
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