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‘Holding on despite everything’: Ukraine on Russia attacks in Donbas
Russia-Ukraine War: Ukrainian forces repelled attacks on 14 settlements, including Bakhmut, it said.
Ukrainian forces are repelling constant Russian attacks on Bakhmut and other towns in the eastern region of Donbas, Ukrainian authorities said on Monday, after denying Kremlin claims of 600 soldiers killed in a missile strike.
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Russia launched seven missile strikes, 31 air strikes and 73 attacks from salvo rocket launchers in the past day, the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces said in a daily report.
Ukrainian forces repelled attacks on 14 settlements, including Bakhmut, it added.
"Bakhmut is holding on despite everything," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in nightly video remarks on Sunday.
"And even though most of the town has been destroyed by Russian strikes, our soldiers are repelling constant Russian attempts to advance."
The nearby town of Soledar was holding on, "even though there is even greater destruction and things are very difficult", he added.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the battlefield reports.
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Zelenskiy made a fresh denunciation of what he called Russia's failure to observe a truce it had proclaimed for Orthodox Christmas by staging attacks on Ukrainian cities.
"Russians were shelling Kherson with incendiary ammunition immediately after Christmas," he said, referring to the southern city abandoned by Russian forces in November.
"Strikes on Kramatorsk and other cities in Donbas - on civilian targets and at the very time when Moscow was reporting a supposed 'silence' for its army."
On Sunday, Russia said a missile attack on Kramatorsk, northwest of Bakhmut, had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers, but a Reuters reporter at the scene found no obvious signs of casualties.
A Reuters team visited two college dormitories that Moscow said had been temporarily housing Ukrainian personnel and which it had targeted as revenge for a New Year's attack that killed scores of Russian soldiers and caused outcry in Russia.
But neither dormitory in the eastern city of Kramatorsk appeared to have been directly hit or seriously damaged. There were no obvious signs that soldiers had been living there and no sign of bodies or traces of blood.
