Ukraine said it was fighting off fierce Russian attacks on the eastern town of Avdiivka as Moscow’s military launched more air strikes against Ukrainian ports, and neighbouring Nato member Romania said another drone had crashed on its territory.
“The situation is very tense. For the third day now, the enemy has not stopped storming positions around the city. They are hitting [military] positions and the city with everything they have – hundreds of strikes on positions, dozens on the city,” said Vitaliy Barabash, head of the administration in Avdiivka, which is on the outskirts of the Russian-held city of Donetsk.
“The invaders are coming from all directions. There are many of them,” he said on Thursday, while rejecting Russian claims to have entered Avdiivka or taken up positions in its vast Soviet-era coking plant, which employed thousands of people before Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr Barabash said at least one resident had been killed and two injured in shelling on Wednesday and that the frequent strikes made rescue work impossible in Avdiivka, where 35,000 people lived before Russian-led militants seized Donetsk in 2014. Now about 1,600 residents remain, spending most of their time in basements and other bomb shelters.
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“Avdiivka. We are holding our ground. It is Ukrainian courage and unity that will determine how this war will end,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on social media.
[ Ukraine seeks air defence boost before winter of Russian strikes on power gridOpens in new window ]
Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Shtupun said Russia “views Avdiivka as an opportunity to gain some kind of significant ‘victory’ and turn the tide of hostilities,” while some analysts said the attack was an attempt to pin down large numbers of Kyiv’s troops in the eastern Donetsk region and stop them joining the counteroffensive further south.
Ukraine said it shot down 28 of 33 strike drones fired by Russia in the early hours of Thursday, most of which targeted southern areas near the Black Sea coast and the Danube river, where Moscow has repeatedly attacked port infrastructure and silos to halt Kyiv’s attempts to re-establish regular shipments of grain to world markets.
“Heinous Russian attacks on Ukraine civilian infrastructure had again serious consequences on Romania’s territory. New evidence of impact was found on Romania’s soil. We call on Russia to stop these war crimes,” Romanian foreign minister Luminita Odobescu wrote on social media.
Romania said debris from Russian drones landed on its soil several times in recent weeks, and on Thursday its defence ministry announced the discovery of “a drone crater” near the village of Plauru, which sits across the Danube from the Ukrainian port of Izmail.
Russia said three people, including a child, were killed in its western Belgorod region by falling debris from a Ukrainian drone that was shot down by air defence systems.
Ukrainian investigators said they had completed identification of 59 people killed in a Russian missile strike on the village of Hroza last week. Two former residents of the village in the eastern Kharkiv region are suspected of helping Russian forces target a cafe during a wake for a fallen Ukrainian soldier.
