At least three people were killed and 15 others injured Friday in Russian shelling of the Ukrainian cities of Kramatorsk in the east and Zaporizhya in the south, local authorities said.
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“A new attack on Kramatorsk – according to initial information, we have two civilians dead and 13 wounded with certainty,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said on Facebook.
“The shelling damaged at least 20 buildings and a fire broke out,” he added, again calling on the local population to evacuate.
A local official in Zaporijjia, Anatoli Kourtev, for his part reported on Telegram the death of a woman on Friday in Russian strikes which also injured two people who were hospitalized.
Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from around Kyiv and Kharkiv at the end of March, most of the fighting has taken place in Donbass, an industrial basin in eastern Ukraine, and in the south, where Kyiv is leading a counter-offensive.
In its evening message, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense acknowledged “partial successes” of Russian forces in the direction of Bakhmout, on the road to Kramatorsk, where troops from Moscow are now trying to “gain a foothold”.
A Ukrainian official in the Kherson region (south), occupied by the Russians, Serguiï Khlan, for his part assured on Facebook that the last bridge used to transport arms to the Russian forces in the area had been “destroyed”. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted Russian logistics axes in this territory in recent weeks.