Russia ups attacks on frontline town after 'lull,' Kiev says

KIEV

Russian forces have escalated attacks near Toretsk, a frontline town in eastern Ukraine that has remained relatively calm over recent months of fighting, officials and AFP journalists reported Wednesday.

Ukrainian forces lacking critical manpower and arms have struggled to hold the line in the eastern Donbas region, which the Kremlin claims is part of Russia.

The military said in a briefing late Tuesday that Russia had "intensified" its assaults near Toretsk and "launched five assault operations at once," targeting surrounding towns and villages.

Military analysts reported Russian advances towards Toretsk, which had an estimated pre-war population of around 32,000 people.

Moscow's troops in recent months have swung the battlefield initiative in their favour and advanced north and south of Toretsk, but the front line has remained relatively stable near the mining town.

The Ukrainian military said the increase in Russian attacks had begun "after a prolonged lull."

One resident of the town, 67-year-old Oleksandr told AFP journalists by telephone that he had experienced an uptick in Russian bombardments, corroborating official reports.

"They started shooting in the morning and it was going on all day long," he told AFP, adding that residents had been taking shelter in basements.

He said residents were staying near the entrances to buildings to gauge the worsening fighting and "so that if anything happens, they can jump inside," adding that a Russian projectile had landed near his home earlier Wednesday.

The head of the region Vadym Filashkin announced Wednesday morning that Russian fire near the town of Pokrovsk further south had left one dead and one wounded over the last 24 hours.

He also said 21 residential buildings had been damaged near Toretsk, nearly double that from one day earlier.

The Kremlin said it had annexed Donetsk along with three other partially occupied Ukrainian regions in late 2022, several months after launching its full-scale invasion.

Energy facilities damaged in Russian attacks

Russia launched nearly two dozen attack drones towards western Ukraine overnight and damaged energy facilities near the border and in the centre of the war-battered country, officials said Wednesday.

The latest bombardment of energy infrastructure comes after officials announced rolling blackouts throughout the day to limit pressure on the grid in the wake of devastating Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants.

"At night, the enemy attacked an energy facility in a central region. Some equipment was damaged," the energy ministry said, adding that police and emergency services had been called to the scene.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said this month that Russian drone and missile attacks had cut Ukraine's electricity generation capacity by half compared to one year ago.

He has called on allies to send more air defence systems to Ukraine to fend off systematic attacks on critical infrastructure.

The Kremlin says its forces do not target civilians or civilian infrastructure but the Russian military has said it carries out retaliatory attacks on energy facilities.

In the western region of Lviv, which has been spared the worst of fighting of the war now in its third year, the energy ministry said "overhead lines and electrical equipment were damaged" in the barrage.

The governor of the western region that borders EU and NATO member Poland said the attacks overnight wounded two civilians, a 47-year-old and a 70-year-old.

The air force said air defence systems had downed 19 Iranian-designed attack drones overnight out of a total of 21 deployed by Russia.

Energy officials warned this week that scheduled and emergency outages were likely to increase in coming weeks. Officials say repair work on the damaged plants could take years and will cost millions of dollars.