The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson again came under Russian shelling late on September 27 after Russian troops struck two businesses in the regional capital, local authorities said.
The State Emergencies Service reported on Telegram that firefighters rushed to the businesses after they were hit but had had to return several times to extinguish the flames.
Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration, announced around 10 p.m. local time that Kherson was under massive shelling. Russia has regularly shelled the Ukrainian-controlled part of Kherson since Moscow withdrew from the regional capital last year.
Russian drone attacks and shelling on September 26 briefly disrupted the rail link between Kherson and the city of Mykolayiv, which was also under air alert on September 27.
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Earlier, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces were making gains against Russian troops in the eastern region of Donetsk as Moscow launched fresh artillery strikes on Ukraine's southern region of Nikopol and Kherson overnight, wounding civilians and damaging houses and infrastructure.
"We are advancing in the Donetsk direction," Zelenskiy said after a conference call with military officials, adding that he was also briefed on the situation in the partially liberated southern region of Kherson, which has been targeted for months by Russian shelling.
"The Russians continue to terrorize the territories their [artillery] can reach," he said.
In the Nikopol region, two people were wounded by Russian shelling, Serhiy Lysak, the head of Dnipropetrovsk region's military administration, said on Telegram on September 27.
"At night, the enemy fired heavy artillery at Myrivska Hromada and [the city of] Nikopol itself," Lysak wrote, adding that the two men who had been wounded were in a moderate condition in hospital. He said a two-story building was set on fire during the attack. "Rescuers put out the fire," Lysak said.
The General Staff of Ukraine's military said in its daily update that Ukrainian forces were conducting offensive operations in the direction of the embattled eastern city of Bakhmut and the southern region of Melitopol, adding that a total of 26 close-quarters battles were fought along the front line over the past 24 hours.
On September 26, Russia again struck grain-exporting facilities in the Odesa region, causing damage and injuries among the local inhabitants, Ukrainian officials said.
Odesa Governor Oleh Kiper said Izmayil, one of the two Danube ports that Ukraine uses to export grain, was hit, and a checkpoint building, storage facilities, and more than 30 trucks and cars were damaged. Two people were wounded, Kiper said.
Russia has stepped up its aerial bombardments of Ukrainian sites, targeting in particular Ukraine's grain-exporting infrastructure in the southern Odesa and Mykolayiv regions.
Ukraine has resumed exporting grain despite Russia’s pulling out of a United Nations-brokered deal allowing safe grain shipments in July.
Zelenskiy has vowed new Ukrainian actions against Russia following a missile strike last week against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters that Kyiv said killed nearly three dozen officers, including its top commander.
"We clearly see which directions of pressure on Russia need to be strengthened to prevent [its] terrorist capabilities from growing," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on September 26.
"Sanctions are not enough," he said.
Ukraine's claim about its strike against the Russian Black Sea Fleet could not be immediately confirmed, and Russia released markedly lower casualty figures from the September 22 attack in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
But the strike itself was the latest in a series of increasingly audacious attacks by Ukrainian forces on Russian ships and Black Sea facilities -- attacks that Western experts say may have drastically curtailed Russia’s naval operations in the region.
In a statement on September 25, Ukraine’s special operations forces cited “new information about the losses of the enemy as a result of the special operation,” claiming that 34 officers, including the fleet commander, were killed when cruise missiles -- believed to be either British or French -- hit the Sevastopol building. At least 105 others were wounded, it said.
The Ukrainian statement did not name the naval commander. The current top officer in the Black Sea Fleet is Admiral Viktor Sokolov.
Asked by reporters on September 26 about the Ukrainian claim, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had no comment.
Sokolov was shown on Russian state television on September 26 among other senior officers attending a video conference with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, although it was not clear when the footage has been recorded.