The day after its Western allies promised to deliver longer-range weapons, Ukraine came under heavy Russian bombardment on Saturday, February 4. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, however, said the Ukrainian army managed to thwart an assault on Bakhmout, an eastern city that the Ukrainian president called a “fortress”. “The enemy is regrouping in certain areas. It is concentrating its main efforts on conducting offensive operations in the directions of Kupiansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Novopavlivka,” he said late in the afternoon.
In the eastern region of Donetsk, “massive” artillery fire targeted Avdiivka, on the front line, on Saturday morning after Kramatorsk, another city highly coveted by the Russians, was hit by rockets overnight. reported the Ukrainian authorities. In the past 24 hours, in the southern province of Zaporizhia alone, shells have fallen on “civilian infrastructure” located on the territories of 26 localities, according to the same sources.
Shelling also continued in Kherson, a major southern city captured and then abandoned by the Russians, where one person was killed and another injured on Friday.
Ukrainian border guards said on Saturday that they had repelled an “assault of the invaders” and chased them out of the suburb of Bakhmout after an aerial reconnaissance revealed that “the enemy was preparing to attack” this city at the epicenter of the fighting in Ukraine. They fired mortars “at the place of concentration of the occupiers” and then “forced them to retreat”, reads their press release.
“This week, the Russian occupation forces exerted all their efforts to break through our defense and encircle Bakhmout and launched a powerful offensive in the Lyman sector. But thanks to the resilience of our soldiers, they failed,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar summed up on Saturday.
The army will defend “as long as it can” Bakhmout, whose Russian forces have been trying for months at the cost of heavy losses to seize, “no one will abandon” this “fortress”, had hammered the day before the president Zelensky. AFP journalists noted the violence of the clashes there on Friday, which reduced some of its neighborhoods to rubble.
For its part, the port city of Odessa suffered major power cuts on Saturday following a technical incident in a power plant, which has been the target of Russian strikes constantly in recent times. “The district and the city of Odessa were almost completely blacked out. Nearly 500,000 people have no electricity,” said Maksym Marchenko, the head of the regional administration.
“All critical infrastructure has been supplied (with power). Thus, the city will have water and heat. About a third of consumers have electricity,” Energy Minister German Galushchenko later said. The head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, Andriï Yermak, meanwhile announced on the same day “a new big exchange of prisoners” which allowed kyiv to recover 116 people. He did not comment on the Russian detainees involved in this operation.
On Friday, the day a summit with the European Union took place in kyiv, Ukraine received the promise of receiving longer-range Western weapons. The new US military aid, in the amount of 2.2 billion dollars, includes in this regard rockets which could almost double the extent of the field of action of the Ukrainian strike force, according to the Pentagon.
These are in particular GLSDB (Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb), small-diameter devices fired from the ground that can reach a target 150 kilometers away and therefore threaten Russian positions behind the front lines. “The handover of the GLSDBs will not take place for several months,” the US Department of Defense said, however.
“If the arms deliveries are accelerated, especially long-range weapons, not only will we not withdraw from Bakhmout, (but) we will start to end the occupation of Donbass”, a region East partly in the hands of the Russians, had commented immediately after President Zelensky.
Paris has also announced that France and Italy will supply a Mamba medium-range surface-to-air defense system in the spring to help Ukraine “defend against attacks by Russian drones, missiles and aircraft”. . And Portugal said on Saturday it was ready to send German-made Leopard 2 heavy tanks to the Ukrainians.
A European embargo on petroleum products exported by sea is also due to come into force on Sunday, a “negative” measure that will “further unbalance” the markets, the Kremlin had deplored.
