Wounded Ukrainian servicemen are being treated in Donetsk region

Pavel Polityuk

Kyiv (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian troops were trying to move northeast and east and were “planning something” in the south as NATO on Wednesday sought to reassure other countries fearing destabilization.

The Ukrainian General Staff said that over the past 24 hours, its forces have repelled six attacks by Russian troops in the east of Donbass, while Russian artillery mercilessly shelled the right bank of the Dnieper and the southern city of Kherson.

Winter weather has made fighting on the ground more difficult, and Zelenskiy has told Ukrainians to prepare for a major Russian attack this week on the electricity infrastructure, which Moscow has attacked every week since early October.

He said the Russian military had attacked the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Donbass, as well as Kharkiv in the northeast, where Ukraine recaptured Russian troops in September.

“The situation at the front is difficult,” he said in his nightly video. “Despite extremely heavy losses, the occupiers are still trying to advance” in Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv. And “they are planning something in the south,” he added, without going into details.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the latest reports from the battlefield.

NATO foreign ministers, including US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, will seek to help fragile states concerned about their own stability in the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

Moldova, Georgia and Bosnia “are under pressure from Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday.

The ministers began their two-day meeting in Bucharest on Tuesday with pledges to help Ukrainians deal with what the head of the defense alliance said was Moscow using winter as a “weapon of war.”

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