Russia launched drones and missiles on Ukraine as people packed churches to celebrate the Orthodox Easter.
Two people were killed and more than a dozen injured, including a child, in weekend attacks on the east of the country.
On Saturday evening, Ukraine’s Air Force reported that it had destroyed 23 of 24 Russian drones fired at Kharkiv, Kherson and the Dnepropetrovsk region.
Earlier in the day, president Volodymr Zelensky said that Ukraine had shot down another Russian fighter jet.
Analysts warn that Russia is ramping up its offensive across Ukraine ahead of US arms reaching Ukrainian frontline forces.
Orthodox Christians in both Ukraine and Russia were celebrating Easter when the strikes hit towns and cities.
“In Pokrovsk, rocket attacks killed two people and damaged a house,” Vadim Filashkin, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, reported.
Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, said: “A missile hit the central part of the city, in the residential area. Currently there are at least five people injured.”
Russian officials have started to describe Kharkiv, which has a population of nearly 2 million people, as a serious target. It’s the first time they have done so since September 2022 when a Ukrainian counterattack forced the Russian army to retreat.
Last month a Russian missile destroyed Kharkiv’s TV tower as part of a series of intensifying attacks.
Russia has been making gains over the past few weeks, pushing back Ukraine’s outnumbered and outgunned forces. On Sunday Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its had captured the village of Ocheretino a few miles west of Avdiivka, a city that Russia seized earlier this year.
Western analysts said that the capture of Ocheretino was part of Russia’s consolidation of control along one section of the frontline and its strategic significance was limited. More important is the battle for Chasiv Yar, a town built on high ground that defends a handful of other cities in the valleys below. There, sources said Ukrainian forces continued to defend against waves of near-suicidal Russian attacks.
The British Ministry of Defence has said that Russia’s army has now suffered 465,000 casualties, dead or injured, in more than two years of war. This is roughly the population of Liverpool.
However, it said Russia could absorb the high casualty rate amid the Kremlin’s plans to reorientate society and the economy to feed its war machine.
“Despite the extreme cost in life, Russia has fully adapted its military to attritional warfare which relies on mass over quality,” it said in its daily security briefing.
Ukrainian generals have briefed that the situation along the front line is dire but Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, has told the FT that Ukraine will be able to hold off Russian attacks with a resupply of weapons and even prepare for a new counteroffensive next year.
In April, after a delay of several months, US lawmakers approved £48 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
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