Zelenskyy made a new denunciation of what he called Russia’s failure to observe a ceasefire it had declared for Russian Orthodox Christmas on Friday and Saturday.
Ukraine never agreed to the ceasefire, calling it a Russian excuse to reinforce troops. Both sides accused the other of continuing hostilities throughout the period.
«The Russians bombarded Kherson with incendiary munitions right after Christmas,» he said, referring to the southern city abandoned by Russian forces in November.
«Attacks in Kramatorsk and other cities in Donbas, on civilian targets and at the very moment that Moscow reported an alleged ‘silence’ for its army.»
On Sunday, Russia said a missile strike in Kramatorsk had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers, but a Reuters reporter at the scene found no visible signs of casualties.
A Reuters team visited two university dormitories that Moscow said were temporarily housing Ukrainian staff and had been targeted in revenge for a New Year’s attack that killed dozens of Russian soldiers and sparked outrage in Russia.
None of the bedrooms appeared to have been directly hit or seriously damaged. There were no obvious signs that the soldiers had been living there, no signs of bodies or traces of blood.
The Kremlin said it was confident its defense ministry was right when it said 600 Ukrainian servicemen had been «destroyed» in the attack. Ukrainian military spokesman Cherevatyi dismissed it as an «information operation.»
As Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine nears the one-year mark, Russia’s military is under internal pressure to achieve battlefield successes.
Hardline voices have called for an escalation of the war effort after setbacks such as the loss of captured territory and high death and injury rates. Some pro-Kremlin military bloggers criticized the Russian Defense Ministry’s claims.
“Let’s talk ‘fraud,’” wrote a prominent pro-war military blogger on the messaging app Telegram, which publishes under the name Military Informant and has more than half a million subscribers.
“It is not clear to us who, and for what reason, decided to have 600 Ukrainian soldiers die inside, all at once, if the building was not actually attacked (even the light remained on).
«Instead of the actual destruction of enemy personnel, which would have been a dignified response, a media-only retaliatory operation was concocted.»
The Russian and Ukrainian armies have often exaggerated enemy losses while underplaying their own.
