On Sunday, pro-Kremlin officials accused Ukraine of being responsible for a rocket attack that hit the mayor’s office in a significant Ukrainian city that the separatists control. Separately, Ukrainian officials said that six people were hurt when Russian rockets reportedly hit a city next to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station.

In the nearly seven weeks since the Ukrainian armed forces launched their southern counteroffensive, Russia has lost land, prompting the strikes on both sides. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Kremlin is thought to have carried out its greatest coordinated air and missile assaults on Ukraine’s major infrastructure last week in response.

The rocket strike in Donetsk, which is under rebel control, severely damaged the municipal building. The building, which had a partially collapsed ceiling as well as rows of blown-out windows, was surrounded by plumes of smoke. Nearby burned-out cars.

There were no reports of casualties right away. Kiev did not immediately take responsibility for the incident or make any comments.

Without giving any supporting evidence, Kremlin-backed separatist authorities have already accused Ukraine of carrying out multiple attacks on seized territory’s residential and infrastructure targets using long-range HIMARS rockets.

Separately, on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said that rocket attacks across from Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, where Russia has deployed soldiers, resulted in at least six casualties.

Two Nikopol citizens were admitted to hospitals as a result of the strikes, which also destroyed a number of commercial and residential structures, five power lines, and gas pipelines. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, confirmed this.

Russia and Ukraine have regularly accused one another of firing at and around the facility, which is still controlled by the Ukrainian employees who are now employed there. Additionally, attacks on civilian towns, such as those in Nikopol and adjacent Marhanets, across the Dnieper river from the plant, have been often reported by Ukrainian officials.

The southern region of Zaporizhzhia, which has experienced constant Russian shelling since Moscow illegally annexed it along with three other Ukrainian provinces last month, also saw the destruction of two schools, a park, and private homes by Russian rockets, according to the presidential office and regional authorities.

Even though 20% of Zaporizhzhia is still under Ukrainian military control, the annexation declaration was made despite this fact. Some analysts have suggested that the recent widespread attacks were part of a Kremlin plan to conquer the area.

Additionally, according to the presidential administration, Moscow has begun resuming its shelling of civilian areas close to the front line in the eastern provinces of Kharkiv and Luhansk, where Kyiv has been waging a counteroffensive. It continued that there were still “active hostilities” in the southern Kherson region, another important area of the ongoing Ukrainian offensive, as a result of frequent Russian attacks on a number of villages that Kyiv had just just retaken.

According to Ria Novosti, Russian officials said that their air defences in the southern Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, shot down “a minimum” of 16 Ukrainian missiles. Three members of the same family were injured as a result of shelling, the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, also noted on Telegram.

Authorities in border regions of Russia have frequently accused Ukraine of firing towards their territory and said that the attacks had injured residents. Ukraine hasn’t admitted guilt for the purported attacks or made any comments about them.

During target practise on Saturday, two former Soviet Union citizens who were training at a Russian military firing range in Belgorod opened fire on volunteer soldiers, killing 11 and injuring 15, before being killed themselves. The fatalities were reported by the Russian Defense Ministry, which described the incident as a terrorist strike.

Numerous people were murdered in Russia’s extensive retaliation attacks this week, which included the deployment of Iranian self-destructing explosive drones.

In an effort to dispel the notion that France has been slow to back Ukraine, the French government announced on Sunday that it will provide air defence missiles to defend Ukrainian cities against drone attacks and increased training for Ukrainian soldiers.

According to Sébastien Lecornu, the French defence minister, up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers will be integrated into French military units and rotate through for several weeks of combat training, more specialised training in logistics and other requirements, and training on equipment provided by France.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, stated on Friday that Moscow did not see the necessity for any mass attacks, but that his military will continue targeted ones. He claimed that seven of the 29 targets the Russian military intended to destroy this week weren’t damaged and will be eliminated gradually.

According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, Putin’s comments were made to respond to pro-war Russian bloggers who “generally supported the beginning of bombings against Ukrainian cities, but warned that a short campaign would be unsuccessful.”

The Institute charged Moscow with carrying out “large, forced deportations of Ukrainians,” which it claimed likely amounted to ethnic cleansing, in a late-Saturday web update.

The update cited claims made this week by Russian authorities, which asserted that, in the midst of an ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive, “several thousand” kids from a southern region captured by Moscow had been housed in rest homes and children’s camps in Russia. The initial comments made by Marat Khusnullin, the deputy prime minister of Russia, were published by RIA Novosti on Friday.

In a possible violation of a crucial international treaty on the prevention of genocide, Russian authorities have previously publicly admitted to transferring children from Russian-held areas of Ukraine, who they claimed were orphans, for adoption with Russian families.

The Ukrainian military also claimed that pro-Kremlin troops had violated international humanitarian law by evicting citizens from their houses in occupied territory so that they could make room for officers.

In a routine Facebook update, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces stated that the evictions were taking place in the eastern Luhansk area, in the Russian-controlled city of Rubizhne, where Kyiv has been pressing a counteroffensive. It did not back up its assertion with any supporting data.