Ukrainian military says it repelled more than dozen attacks

KYIV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian military said Monday that it had repelled more than a dozen Russian attacks in the country’s east and north, including attempts to advance on key cities in the eastern industrial heartland known as the Donbas.

In its regular Facebook update, the military’s general staff said Russian troops had attempted to push towards Kramatorsk, one of two major cities in the eastern Donetsk province that remain under Ukrainian control, but “they failed completely and chaotically retreated to their previous positions.”

In the same post, the military said Russian forces had staged an unsuccessful assault on Bakhmut, a strategic town in the Donetsk region whose capture would pave the way for Russia to take Kramatorsk and the de facto Ukrainian administrative capital, Sloviansk.

The Donetsk region is one of two provinces that make up the Donbas, where the fighting has largely been focused in recent months, since Kremlin forces retreated from around the capital, Kyiv.

Russian officials announced the full capture of the Luhansk region, the second of the two, early last month, though its Ukrainian governor has repeatedly claimed that Kyiv’s forces are holding out in a small area near the regional boundary.

In the same update, the military claimed that Russia had tried and failed to break through Ukrainian defense lines in the northern Kharkiv region, home to Ukraine’s second-largest city, but were “met harshly and thrown back.”

Meanwhile, the Russian FSB, the KGB’s main successor agency, said that it had thwarted a “sabotage and terrorist attack” on an oil pipeline in Russia’s southern Volgograd region, which it blamed on two Russian citizens colluding with Ukrainian security forces.

Elsewhere, Russian and Ukrainian officials traded more accusations Monday about renewed shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with each side alleging that the other was responsible for the attacks that have raised fears of a catastrophe.