Ukraine strikes Wagner HQ in Luhansk, governor sayson December 11, 2022 at 4:28 pm

Southern Ukraine has been hit by strikes from both sides in the war, with Russia launching drones at Odesa and Ukraine fighting back in Melitopol.

The Ukrainian army said it shot down 10 drones on Saturday but another five had hit energy facilities, leaving some 1.5 million people without power.

Later on, the exiled mayor of Melitopol said a Ukrainian strike had been carried out on the Russia-held city.

Images shared by a Moscow-installed official there showed a big fire.

Russia’s drone attack on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa saw Moscow fire Iran-made drones at key infrastructure, Ukrainian officials said.

“The situation in the Odesa region is very difficult,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address. “Unfortunately the hits were critical, so it takes more than just time to restore electricity. It doesn’t take hours, but a few days.”

Since October, Moscow has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with large waves of missile and drone strikes.

In Melitopol, pro-Moscow authorities said a Ukrainian missile attack had killed two people and injured 10.

“Air defence systems destroyed two missiles, four reached their targets,” Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russia-installed governor of the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He added that a “recreation centre” where people were dining had been destroyed in the attack, and that Ukrainian forces had used US-supplied Himars rocket launchers.

This weapon has played a key role in Ukraine’s counter-offensive, being used to target locations away from the frontlines, including Russia’s command posts.

Ivan Fedorov, Melitopol’s exiled mayor, said scores of “invaders” had been killed.

Melitopol has been under occupation since early March and is a major logistics hub for the Russian forces in the south-east.

The city, in the Zaporizhzhia region, is strategically located between Mariupol to the east, Kherson and the Dnipro River to the west, and Crimea to the south.

Ukraine says its efforts to retake occupied territory are continuing, despite the arrival of winter.

In recent weeks, most of the fighting has taken place in the east of the country, especially around the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.

But on Saturday night, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Zelensky, indicated that Melitopol could be a main target of Ukrainian forces.

“If Melitopol falls, the entire defence line all the way to Kherson collapses,” he said in an interview.

If that happened, he added, “Ukrainian forces would gain a direct route to Crimea,” the peninsula Russia invaded and annexed in 2014 and that the Ukrainians have vowed to retake.