People walk past a destroyed building in Kupiansk, Kharkiv region, on September 19, 2022
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)Deadly blasts have killed 13 in the separatist-run city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, its Russian-backed mayor has said.
Alexei Kulemzin blamed “punitive" Ukrainian shellfire for the fatalities but there was no comment from Ukrainian officials.
Donetsk has been controlled by a Russian-backed proxy since 2014.
Ukraine’s forces have launched extensive counter-offensives in the south as well as the north-east, regaining swathes of territory in the Kharkiv region.
It comes as a Russian missile hit a crater close to a nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine on Monday, damaging nearby industrial equipment but not hitting any of the plant’s three reactors.
Ukrainian authorities have denounced the move as an act of “nuclear terrorism."
The missile struck within 300 metres of the reactors at the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk in Mykolaiv province, according to Ukrainian nuclear operator Energoatom.
The proximity of the strike renewed fears that Russia's nearly 7-month-long war in Ukraine might produce a radiation disaster.
This nuclear power station is Ukraine's second-largest after the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which has repeatedly come under fire.
Throughout the war, Russia has targeted Ukraine's electricity generation equipment, causing blackouts and prompting concerns about nuclear power plant safety.
Patricia Lewis, the international security research director at the Chatham House think-tank, said attacks at the Zaporizhzhia plant and Monday's strike on the South Ukraine plant indicated that the Russian military was attempting to knock Ukrainian nuclear plants offline before winter.
“It's a very, very dangerous and illegal act to be targeting a nuclear station,” Ms Lewis told The Associated Press. “Only the generals will know the intent, but there's clearly a pattern."
“What they seem to be doing each time is to try to cut off the power to the reactor," she said. “It's a very clumsy way to do it, because how accurate are these missiles?"
The Ukrainian successes in Kharkiv, Russia's biggest defeat since its forces were repelled from around Kyiv at the beginning of the war, have fueled rare public criticism in Russia.
Some of the Kremlin's pro-nationalist critics have pressured Moscow to plunge Ukraine into darkness by hitting all of its major nuclear power plants.
