Ukrainian forces damage key bridge near Melitopol, reports say

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Ukrainian forces have reportedly damaged a key bridge outside the southern city of Melitopol, a key objective for Kyiv in the region.

The crossing over the Molochna River is situated between Melitopol and the village of Kostyantynivka just to the east of the city on the M14 highway and was struck overnight.

Video posted online showed two supports of the bridge had been damaged during the attack, with the span partly collapsed by the blast, making it reportedly unusable for heavy military traffic.

The strike on the bridge comes just two days after Ukraine hit a Russian barracks sited in a resort in the city, with Himars rockets causing substantial damage and casualties.

The increase in Ukrainian pressure on Russian forces in Melitopol appears to be following a similar pattern to tactics used against Kherson before its liberation, with the targeting of both Russian troops and supply lines, including logistics links to the Crimean peninsula and to the east via the Russia-occupied cities to Berdiansk and Mariupol.

With Ukrainian forces now operating east of the Dnipro River, Melitopol is seen as a key objective for Kyiv in the south of the country after the recapture of Kherson.

In the country’s east, where there has been recent heavy fighting around the city of Bakhmut, both Russia and Ukraine said on Tuesday that the situation on the battlefield in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk was difficult, with each claiming some successes in repelling the other’s attacks.

The so-called Donetsk People’s Republic is one of four regions in Ukraine that Moscow proclaimed as its own in September in an exercise Ukraine and its allies denounced as a “sham”, coercive referendum.

Advancing in some areas the region was difficult, the top Moscow-installed official in the occupied parts of the territory in eastern Ukraine said, but they added that more than half of Donetsk was under Russian control.

“A little more than 50% of the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic has been liberated,” Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed administrator of the portion controlled by Moscow, told the Russian state-owned news agency RIA.

Ukraine’s military command said in its daily battlefield update on Tuesday that its forces had repelled Russians in 10 areas of the region.

Russia has claimed to be gradually advancing its positions, with the defence ministry saying on Monday that its offensive there had killed 30 Ukrainian military personnel the day before.

However, independent assessments of Russian gains show little progress in weeks of heavy fighting as Ukraine has moved to shore up its positions ahead of the arrival of full winter conditions on the front.

The latest fighting came as dozens of countries and international organisations were throwing their weight behind a fresh and urgent push on Tuesday to keep Ukraine powered, fed, warm and moving in the face of sustained Russian aerial bombardments that have plunged millions into the cold and dark in winter.

An international donor conference in Paris was expected to raise and help coordinate many tens of millions of dollars of aid – both financial and in kind – to be rushed to Ukraine in the coming weeks and months to help its beleaguered civilian population survive winter’s freezing temperatures and long nights.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, in a speech opening the conference, described Moscow’s bombardments of civilian targets as a war crime. He said the Kremlin was attacking civilian infrastructure because its troops had suffered setbacks on the battlefields.

Moscow’s intention is to “plunge the Ukrainian people into despair”, Macron said.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who spoke by video link, said 12 million Ukrainians were suffering power outages. He said the country needed electricity generators as urgently as it needed armoured vehicles and armoured vests for its troops.

As temperatures plunge and snow falls, Ukraine’s needs are huge and pressing. Successive waves of missile and drone attacks since October have destroyed about half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the government in Kyiv says.

It says Russia is trying to create a fresh wave of refugees to Europe. Russia says striking civilian infrastructure is intended to weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. In Ukraine, life for many is becoming a battle for survival.

“Globally we need everything,” said Yevhen Kaplin, who heads a Ukrainian humanitarian group, Proliska, providing cooking stoves, blankets and other aid to frontline regions and away from the battlefields.

With “the shelling, the missiles strikes and strikes on the infrastructure, we can’t say whether there will be gas tomorrow, we can’t predict whether to buy gas stoves or not”, he said. “Every day the picture changes.”

Agencies contributed to this report