“Our Resilience…: Ukraine Fights Off Fresh Russian Attack In Key City”.

Kyiv:

Ukraine fought off a fresh Russian offensive on the troubled eastern city of Bakhmut, its leaders said on Saturday, as it endured a fresh wave of shelling in the disputed Donetsk region.

Authorities have meanwhile recovered the bodies of two British volunteers who were trying to help evacuate people from the eastern war zone.

And the southern city of Odessa suffered massive power cuts after an accident at a war-damaged electrical substation, affecting half a million households.

“This week, the Russian occupation forces unleashed all their efforts to break through our defense zone and encircle Bakhmut and launched a powerful offensive in the Lyman region,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said.

“But thanks to the resilience of our soldiers, they did not succeed.”

Ukraine’s border guard service reported that its troops repelled the latest attack, killing four opposing forces and wounding seven.

Russia launched a new wave of bombings on the Eastern Front on Saturday morning. Ukrainian officials reported shelling in Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv Lugansk, Donetsk and Mykolaiv regions.

In his evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that the situation was becoming difficult.

Russia, he said, was “throwing more and more of its forces to break our defences”.

“It is very difficult now in Bakhmut, Vugledar, Lyman and other regions,” he said, referring to border towns in the east of the country.

France, Italy and the United States on Friday pledged new arms supplies to Ukraine.

Germany’s leader said in an interview on Sunday that it was agreed that weapons supplied by the West would not be used to attack Russian territory.

“There is a consensus on this point,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in an interview with the weekly Bild am Sonntag.

Kyiv, while expressing its gratitude for the pledged weapons, is already pressing for more, including fighter jets.

foreign casualty

Authorities in Kyiv said on Saturday that the bodies of two Britons killed while trying to help evacuate people from the eastern war zone had been recovered in a prisoner exchange.

Chris Parry, 28, and Andrew Bagshaw, 47, were doing voluntary work in Soledar, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, when their vehicle was reportedly hit by a shell.

Their bodies were returned to Ukrainian authorities as part of a wider exchange, in which Kyiv received 116 prisoners and Russia 63.

“We managed to return the bodies of the dead foreign volunteers,” said Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andrey Yermak, naming them as two British men.

Concern about their fate was raised after the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, which helped capture Soledar from the Ukrainian military on 11 January, said the body of one of the missing men had been found there.

Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin also published photos online of passports that appeared to belong to Parry and Bagshaw, which he claimed were found with the corpses.

On Friday news emerged of the death of an American medic who was killed in Bakhmut when his evacuation vehicle was hit by a missile.

Global Outreach Doctors, with whom he was working, said Pete Reed, 33, was a former US Marine Corps rifleman who also served as a paramedic.

The power cut affected millions of people in Odessa.

“As of today, about 500,000 customers are without electricity,” said Maxim Marchenko of the Odessa regional administration. Energy Minister Herman Galushchenko said there had been “about a third of consumers”.

“The situation is complex, the scale of the accident is significant,” Prime Minister Denis Schmigel said on the messaging app Telegram.

The country’s energy operator Ukrainergo reported an accident at a substation supplying both the city and the region of Odessa.

The power network there had been gradually eroded by repeated Russian bombardment in recent months, it said: “As a result, the reliability of the power supply in the region has been undermined.”

latest ban

On Sunday, Russia faced a new twist in the sanctions screw with a ban on ship deliveries of its refined oil products.

The European Union, the Group of Seven industrialized countries and Australia will cap the price of Moscow’s refined oil products.

Already in December, the European Union banned Russian crude from arriving by sea and, along with its G7 partners, imposed a cap of $60 a barrel on Russian crude exports to other parts of the world.

The new restrictions and price limits starting Sunday will target Russian refined oil products such as petrol, diesel and heating fuel carried on ships.

The Kremlin has warned that the measures would destabilize world markets.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)