KRAMATORSK: Ukraine warned on Friday that a key frontline town was coming under “constant fire” from advancing Russian troops as Moscow said it had captured another small village.

Russia’s advances on the battlefield came as Ukraine said it had destroyed at least six military planes at a Russian airbase in one of its largest overnight drone attacks in weeks.

Buoyed by their advantage in manpower and arms, Russian forces are on the offensive.

The Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar in the eastern Donetsk region appears to be their next major target.

“The town has become even more dangerous,” the head of the Chasiv Yar military administration, Sergiy Chaus, said on Friday during an interview in the nearby city of Kramatorsk.

“If before there were moments when you could hear silence in the town, now there is no silence… There is constant fire,” he said.

Both Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers with links to the armed forces said on Friday that Russian troops had reached the outskirts of the town.

Chaus declined to comment on those reports. He said there were around 770 people still living there.

“There is not a single building left intact,” he added. Chasiv Yar is an important logistics hub for Kyiv’s forces and sits a few kilometres west of Bakhmut, which was flattened by months of artillery fire before it was captured by Russia last May.

Russia has recently secured its first territorial gains since seizing Bakhmut and is now trying to press onwards against Ukrainian units hobbled by delays in the supply of vital Western military aid.

Further to the south, Russia’s military claimed on Friday to have captured the small village of Vodiane, on the outskirts of Donetsk city.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that his forces had “managed to stabilise our positions” and had halted Russian advances, despite a “shortage of shells and a significant slowdown in supplies”.

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2024