Russian forces were wrestling for control of villages in eastern Ukraine near the beleaguered city of Bakhmut over the weekend, the latest flashpoint in a battle that Moscow views as crucial for its push to seize the entire eastern region of Donbas.
Ukraine's general staff said Sunday that its soldiers had repelled attacks on the small village of Blahodatne and several other settlements in the area. The statement came a day after Russia's Wagner group, a private military company that has conducted much of the fighting around Bakhmut on Moscow's behalf, claimed its forces had captured Blahodatne.
"Blahodatne is under our control," Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessperson and the head of the Wagner group, said Saturday in a statement posted on a website for one of his companies.
Russia's defense ministry has not confirmed the report, and the claim could not be independently verified. Prigozhin has sought to cast his mercenaries as the most effective fighting force in the area and previously has claimed credit for battlefield advances ahead of Kremlin confirmation.
Blahodatne lies between Soledar, a salt-mining town that Russian forces recently captured after weeks of intense fighting, and a road that runs north from the city of Bakhmut. The road serves as a crucial supply line for Ukrainian forces defending the city.
Since the summer, Bakhmut has become a focal point of the fighting in eastern Ukraine and the target of Moscow's most significant offensive.
Moscow aims to encircle Bakhmut, cut off its supply routes and then force the city's defenders to withdraw. Despite some recent success, Russia's progress in the campaign, which began over the summer, has been grindingly slow, and both sides have suffered heavy casualties in intense fighting.
But since capturing Soledar earlier this month, Russian forces have increased shelling of the villages just to the west of it, including Blahodatne.
Many civilians have followed a directive from the government in Kyiv to leave Donetsk, which is home to Bakhmut and one of the two regions that make up the Donbas region. Civilians who have stayed remain vulnerable to shelling and artillery attacks, with dozens killed in recent weeks. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of Donetsk's military administration, said Sunday that five civilians had been killed a day earlier in the region.
Almost a year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both sides are expected to launch renewed offensives in the coming months, as Kyiv puts to use the heavy weapons sent from the West and Russia deploys the huge numbers of men it drafted last year.
Amid warnings that Russian forces were regrouping for an anticipated spring offensive, Ukraine's allies pledged new sophisticated weapons for the fight.
Germany and the United States last week announced that they would send battle tanks to Ukraine, a move that came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations between Western officials. But it may be months before the tanks rumble across the battlefield.
Britain's defense ministry said Sunday that the first Ukrainian soldiers had arrived in Britain for training on the Challenger 2 tanks that were promised earlier this month.
In a speech Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine expressed gratitude for the latest promises of military aid but said his country's allies should still do more.
"Ukraine needs long-range missiles, in particular, to remove this possibility of the occupiers to place their missile launchers somewhere far from the front line and destroy Ukrainian cities with them," he said in an overnight address.
The city of Kherson in southern Ukraine has faced repeated strikes in recent weeks. On Sunday, shelling there killed at least three people and wounded six others, including a nurse, according to the regional military administration.
"Today, the Russian army has been shelling Kherson atrociously all day," Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Sunday. "Residential buildings, various social and transport facilities, including a hospital, post office and bus station have been damaged. Two women, nurses, were wounded in the hospital. As of now, there are reports of six wounded and three dead."
Russian forces have shelled Kherson on a near-daily basis after their retreat from the city in November.
But the Kremlin has set full control of the Donbas, where it has held considerable ground since 2014, as its immediate military objective. To that end it has mobilized tens of thousands of new recruits, although it has failed to achieve sweeping territorial gains in the region in recent months.
Military authorities in Ukraine say Moscow's advances in the Donbas region have come at the expense of heavy casualties, not least among the ranks of the Wagner private military company. Some analysts of the conflict say Wagner's failure to secure Bakhmut, even after months of fighting, has dimmed its star in some Russian military circles.
The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said in a report Saturday that conventional Russian forces were "likely replacing exhausted" Wagner forces "to maintain the offensive in Bakhmut" after the capture of Soledar.
But Russia might be less willing to sustain heavy losses among regular conscripts than among Wagner fighters, the report said.
"The Russians' ability to execute large-scale rapid offensives on multiple axes this winter and spring is thus very questionable," the report said.
SCIENTIST KILLED
Friends and volunteers gathered Sunday at Kyiv's St. Sophia's Cathedral to say goodbye to Andrew Bagshaw, a New Zealand scientist who was killed in Ukraine with another volunteer while they were trying to evacuate people from a front-line town.
Bagshaw, 48, a dual New Zealand-British citizen, and British volunteer Christopher Parry, 28, went missing this month while heading to the town of Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region, where heavy fighting was taking place.
Volunteers spoke of their memories of Bagshaw and read tributes from his family.
Nikolletta Stoyanova, a friend in Ukraine, shared memories of his bravery.
"Even if no one wanted to go to Soledar, they can do that. Because if he understood that someone needs help, they need to do this help for these people," Stoyanova said, speaking in English.
Bagshaw's father, Phil, told reporters in New Zealand that his son wanted to do something to help.
"He was a very intelligent man and a very independent thinker," he said. "And he thought a long time about the situation in Ukraine, and he believed it to be immoral. He felt the only thing he could do of a constructive nature was to go there and help people."
Ukrainian police said Jan. 9 that they lost contact with Bagshaw and Parry after the two headed for Soledar. Their bodies were later recovered. A Ukrainian official reported Wednesday that the defending forces made an organized retreat from the salt-mining town.
In a Jan. 24 statement, Parry's family said he was "drawn to Ukraine in March in its darkest hour." They said he'd "helped those most in need, saving over 400 lives plus many abandoned animals."
Friends said the men's bodies would be handed over to relatives in the U.K.
On Sunday, Russia's Foreign Ministry accused Ukraine and its Western allies of war crimes in connection with the shelling of two hospitals in Russian-held parts of Ukraine.
Russian officials said 14 people died Saturday when a hospital in the eastern Luhansk province settlement of Novoaidar was struck. They said shells also fell on the territory of a hospital in Nova Kakhovka, a Russian-occupied city in Kherson province where a strategically vital bridge across the lower reaches of the Dnieper is located.
"The deliberate shelling of active civilian medical facilities and the targeted killing of civilians are grave war crimes of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters," the Foreign Ministry said. "The lack of reaction from the United States and other NATO countries to this, yet another monstrous trampling of international humanitarian law by Kyiv, once again confirms their direct involvement in the conflict and involvement in the crimes being committed."
Russian forces have shelled hundreds of hospitals and other medical facilities in Ukraine since the war began, reducing more than 100 of them to rubble, according to the Ukrainian Health Ministry.
Russian state TV aired footage of what it said was the damaged hospital in Novoaidar. It said rockets hit the pediatric department of the two-story building.
"There are no military factories here. There are no military vehicles, no tanks. Who did you shoot at?" Olga Ryasnaya said in an interview on Russian TV, which identified her as a pediatric nurse.
Luhansk province, where Novoaidar is located, is almost entirely under the control of Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists. Russian and separatist officials claimed the hospital was deliberately targeted. The movements of journalists are restricted in areas of Ukraine under Russian control.
The Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian forces were likely increasing strikes on Russian positions deep inside Luhansk province, closer to the Russian border, in an effort "to disrupt Russian logistics and ground lines of communication." It said the strikes could be part of preparations for a future counteroffensive.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg of The New York Times and by staff writers of The Associated Press.