Five drones shot downed in Crimea's Dzhankoi, says Moscow-installed official

There were no casualties but windows were broken in several houses

MSCOW (Reuters) – Five drones were shot down and four were jammed and did not hit their targets in Dzhankoi in Crimea, a Russian-installed official in the peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014 said on Sunday.

There were no casualties but windows were broken in several houses, Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea's administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He added that one unexploded drone was found on the territory of a residential house, forcing the temporary evacuation of about 50 people in the area.

Reuters could not independently verify the report.

Russia has a military air base near Dzhankoi. Ukrainian officials have long said the city and surrounding areas have been turned into Moscow's largest military base in Crimea.

CLASHES CONTINUE

Despite a recent easing of combat in Bakhmut, clashes around the obliterated city in eastern Ukraine continue with Moscow suffering significant losses, Kyiv's armed forces said on Sunday.

Ukraine's top military command said in its daily report on Sunday that Russian forces had carried out two unsuccessful operations around Bakhmut and launched a number of air strikes and artillery shelling on nearby villages.

The head of Russia's mercenary Wagner Group said on Saturday that 99% of his fighters had left Bakhmut after their months-long assault in the war's longest and bloodiest battle.

Ukraine said late last month that fighting had eased in the area, but the commander of the nation's ground forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Saturday that Ukrainian forces continued their fight there.

"The enemy continues to suffer significant losses in the Bakhmut direction," Syrskyi said on the Telegram messaging app after what he said was a visit to troops around Bakhmut. "Defence forces continue to fight. We will win."

Bakhmut, once home to 70,000 people, has no strategic value, according to military analysts. But Moscow has said capturing it would be a stepping stone to advance deeper into the industrial region of Donbas, which it claims to have annexed from Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has compared Bakhmut's destruction to the US atomic bomb attack on Japan's Hiroshima in World War Two.

The Ukrainian daily report on Sunday said some 23 combat clashes had taken place over the past day in the Donetsk region, home to Bakhmut, and the neighbouring Luhansk region, which together make up the Donbas.

British defence intelligence said on Saturday that Russia continued to redeploy regular military units to the Bakhmut sector, replacing Wagner fighters.

Zelenskiy said in an interview published on Saturday that his forces were ready to launch the long-expected counteroffensive to reclaim territory now occupied by Russia.

Kyiv hopes the counteroffensive will change the dynamics of the war that has raged since Russia invaded its smaller neighbour 15 months ago.

Russia now controls nearly all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as well as swaths of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.