After denying Kremlin claims that 600 soldiers were killed in a missile strike, Ukrainian authorities said on Monday that their forces are repelled by Russian attacks on Bakhmut and other towns in the eastern region of the Donbas.
The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces stated in a daily report that Russia carried out seven missile strikes, 31 airstrikes, and 73 attacks from salvo rocket launchers in the preceding day.
It added that 14 settlements, including Bakhmut, were attacked by Ukrainian forces.
In a Sunday night video address, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy stated, “Bakhmut is holding on despite everything.”
“And even though Russian strikes have destroyed most of the town, our soldiers are constantly repelling Russian attempts to advance.”
“Even though there is even greater destruction and things are very difficult,” he added, the nearby town of Soledar held on.
Zelenskiy made a new attack on Russia for attacking Ukrainian cities in violation of a truce it had declared for Orthodox Christmas.
He said, referring to the southern city that Russian forces had abandoned in November, “Russians were shelling Kherson with incendiary ammunition immediately after Christmas.”
“At the same time that Moscow was reporting a pretended “silence” for its army, strikes were carried out on Kramatorsk and other cities in the Donbas, targeting civilian targets.”
Russia claimed on Sunday that a missile attack on Kramatorsk, northwest of Bakhmut, had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers; however, a Reuters reporter who was present at the scene discovered no obvious signs of casualties.
A team from Reuters went to two college dorms that Moscow claimed had temporarily housed Ukrainian personnel. Moscow said it had targeted the dorms as retaliation for an attack on New Year’s Eve that killed dozens of Russian soldiers and sparked outrage in Russia.
However, neither dormitory in Kramatorsk, an eastern city, appeared to have been seriously or directly hit. There were no obvious indications that soldiers had resided there, and there were also no signs of bodies or blood stains.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern region of the Ukrainian military, said that the Russian defense ministry was trying to show that it had reacted strongly to Ukraine’s recent attacks on Russian soldiers.
Cherevatyi stated to Ukrainian television station Suspilne News, “This is an information operation of the Russian defense ministry.”
Russia’s military is under domestic pressure to deliver battlefield successes as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine approaches its one-year mark.
After setbacks like the loss of captured territory and high death and injury rates, hawkish voices have attempted to ramp up the war effort.
The claims made by the Russian defense ministry have been criticized by prominent Russian military bloggers.
On the messaging app Telegram, a prominent pro-war military blogger who posts under the name Military Informant and has more than 500,000 subscribers wrote, “Let’s talk about ‘fraud.'”
“If the building was not struck (even the light remained on), it is not clear who decided that 600 Ukrainian soldiers died inside at once or why.
“An exclusive media operation of retaliation was invented instead of the real destruction of the enemy personnel, which would have been a worthy response.”
Both Russia’s and Ukraine’s militaries have frequently minimized their own losses while exaggerating those of their adversaries.
Two attacks on Moscow-controlled areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, according to top Ukrainian military officials last week, resulted in the deaths or injuries of approximately 760 Russian troops. It was impossible to independently verify these reports.
