Ukrainian forces are repelling ongoing Russian attacks on Bakhmut and other towns in the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian authorities said Monday, after denying Kremlin claims that 600 soldiers were killed in a missile attack.
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Russia launched seven missile attacks, 31 airstrikes and 73 salvo rocket launcher attacks in the past day, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said in a daily report.
Ukrainian forces repelled attacks on 14 settlements, including Bakhmut, it added.
“Bakhmut holds on despite everything,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in late-night video comments on Sunday.
“And while most of the city has been destroyed by Russian attacks, our soldiers are repelling continued Russian attempts to advance.”
The nearby town of Soledar was holding on, “although there is even greater destruction and things are very difficult,” he added.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the reports from the battlefield.
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Zelenskiy made a new denunciation of what he described as Russia’s breach of a truce it had proclaimed for Orthodox Christmas by organizing attacks on Ukrainian cities.
“The Russians were shelling Kherson with incendiary munitions right after Christmas,” he said, referring to the southern city abandoned by Russian forces in November.
“Attacks in Kramatorsk and other cities in Donbas, on civilian targets and at the very moment that Moscow reported an alleged ‘silence’ for its army.”
On Sunday, Russia said a missile strike in Kramatorsk, northwest of Bakhmut, had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers, but a Reuters reporter at the scene found no obvious signs of casualties.
A Reuters team visited two university dormitories that Moscow said were temporarily housing Ukrainian staff and had been targeted in revenge for a New Year’s attack that killed dozens of Russian soldiers and sparked protests in Russia.
But none of the dormitories in the eastern city of Kramatorsk appeared to have been directly hit or seriously damaged. There were no obvious signs that the soldiers had been living there, no signs of bodies or traces of blood.
