Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address that his priority was to stop the Russian attacks and prepare for an eventual Ukrainian counteroffensive.
“Presenting the situation and preparing for any move by the enemy – this is the priority for the near future,” he said.
NATO alliance officials this week discussed the need for more military hardware for Kiev, and Britain and Poland agreed after their leaders met on Thursday that support should be increased.
US officials have advised Ukraine to hold off on any retaliatory strikes until the latest supplies of US weapons are delivered and training is provided.
Ukraine’s military general staff said in a Thursday evening report that Russia had also shelled more than two dozen eastern and southern settlements.
There was no word from Russia on the missile strikes or shelling, and reports from the battlefield could not be independently verified.
‘heaps of dead bodies’
Russia’s focus is on the small town of Bakhmut east of Donetsk, one of two regions making up Donbass, the industrial heartland of Ukraine now partially occupied by Russia.
In pitched battles led by a group of Wagner mercenaries, the Russians have been besieging and besieging Bakhmut for months. Most of the pre-war population of about 70,000 people has been dug out and abandoned by Ukrainian troops.
“They’re sending a lot of troops. I don’t think it’s sustainable for them,” Taras Dzyoba, press officer for the Ukrainian 80th Air Assault Brigade, said of the Russians.
“There are places where their dead bodies are piled up. There is a ditch where … they do not take out their wounded or killed.”
Dzioba spoke to Reuters as he stood beside a howitzer battery outside a defensive bunker close to the Bakhmut front lines.
Its capture would give Russia a stepping stone to advance further west on two large Donetsk cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. But Ukraine and allies say that taking Bakhmut would be a miraculous victory given the damage Russia has done over the past few months and.
In an interview with a pro-war military blogger, the head of the Wagner Group predicted that it would take weeks if not months for Russian forces to capture Bakhmut, depending on how many men Ukraine throws into the fight and how well supplied his men were.
In Munich, the war will restart a long-standing debate about how much Europe should build up its military capability, amid concerns about the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, how much it should rely on the United States for its security .