Shortly after the official end of the ceasefire declared by Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, authorities in the region around the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine reported several explosions. There is already one fatality, Governor Oleh Synehubow said on Telegram on Saturday night. Air raid alarms were also triggered immediately after 22:00 CET in Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk regions and on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia.
“Attention residents of Kharkiv and region: Stay in shelters. Occupiers are attacking again!” Synehubov warned on Telegram. Russia has also previously admitted to breaking the self-imposed ceasefire during the Orthodox Christmas.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday that Ukrainian attacks had returned. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saw the bombing as further proof of “how wrong is every word that comes out of Moscow”. According to Ukrainian sources, two civilians died when the city of Bakhmut was bombed.
The attacks were returned
“Today the world can see once again how wrong any word that comes from any level in Moscow is,” Zelenskyy said in his video diary on Saturday night. “They said something about a supposed ceasefire. But in reality Bakhmut and other Ukrainian positions were again hit by Russian volleys.”
According to the Russian account, only Ukrainian attacks were returned during the ceasefire. “All Ukrainian army positions from which the shelling came were crushed by Russian forces who returned fire,” ministry spokesman Konashenkov said on Saturday.
There were combat operations in the Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. Regardless, Konashenkov said Russia is adhering to the self-imposed 36-hour ceasefire, which officially ended at 10 pm ET on Saturday night.
Two killed, 13 injured
Zelenskyy’s adviser Mykhailo Podoliak on Saturday reported a Russian bombardment along the entire front. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced on Saturday that two civilians were killed and 13 others were wounded by Russian shelling in Bakhmut, Donetsk region, on Friday. Eyewitnesses also reported constant artillery shelling on the town of Chasiv Yar. The Ukrainian General Staff reported a Russian rocket attack, and within 24 hours the Russian side also fired 20 shells from multiple rocket launchers.
Putin announced the temporary ceasefire on Thursday, citing the Christmas festival that many Orthodox Christians celebrate on January 7 as the reason. Ukraine, however, dismissed this as a hypocritical propaganda gesture and continued its reconquest attempts. There can be no peace as long as Russian troops occupy Ukrainian territory, sources in Kyiv say.
Many international observers also doubted from the start that the Russian guns would really remain silent. According to estimates by British intelligence services, fighting continued at the usual level during the orthodox Christmas period.
The small town of Bakhmut has been the focus of fighting for weeks. During the siege, the Wagner mercenary group made a name for itself. Its founder, Yevgeny Prigoschin, justified the move into the small town with the huge existing tunnel systems, in which tanks can also be hidden. “The icing on the cake is the Soledar and Bakhmut mining system, which is actually a network of underground cities,” Prigozhin explained via Telegram on Saturday. “It can not only accommodate a large group of people at a depth of 80 to 100 meters, but tanks and armored vehicles can also move in it.”
Prigozhin commented after suspicions arose that Prigozhin was pushing for the capture of Bakhmut and its salt and gypsum mines for commercial reasons. According to military experts, the great military effort involved in the siege of the city has nothing to do with its comparatively low strategic importance.
250,000 square meter minefield
One of the hardest-fought areas is still around the town of Kreminna in the Luhansk region, according to the British Defense Ministry’s daily summary report on Saturday. “For the past three weeks, the fighting around Kreminna has been concentrated in the heavily wooded area to the west of the city.” As the forests offered some privacy from aerial observation, even in winter, both sides would likely have difficulty timing artillery fire accurately.
According to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal, the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine has created a minefield of 250,000 square kilometers in his country. “Currently it is the biggest minefield in the world,” Schmyhal said in an interview with South Korean Yonhap news agency published on Saturday. According to Schmyhal, the mined area corresponds to more than 40% of the entire land area of Ukraine. “This not only makes it difficult for people to move around, but also causes greater disruption to agriculture, which is one of our main industries,” said the prime minister. (apa)