The Ukrainian military said Russian forces on June 10 focused their main efforts on the full occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian counteroffensive actions were under way.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said 28 combat clashes took place during the day, and the Ukrainian Air Force made 15 strikes on the concentration points of the Russian Army.
Ukrainian rocket and artillery fire struck two control points, five areas of troop concentrations, weapons, and military equipment, one artillery unit in a firing position, and four other "important objects of the occupiers," the summary states.
In addition, the enemy carried out 66 air strikes and launched 39 attacks from rocket systems.
"Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded among the civilian population, private houses and other civil and administrative infrastructure have been destroyed and damaged," the General Staff said in its evening update.
The report said Ukrainian forces had repelled enemy attacks around Bakhmut and Maryinka, sites of heavy clashes in the east. Russian forces, it said, "continue to suffer heavy losses which they are trying to conceal."
RFE/RL cannot independently confirm the battlefield claims.
Zelenskiy said earlier that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations were under way but declined to divulge details. Speaking at a joint press conference in Kyiv with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelenskiy told reporters to pass on to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine's generals are "all in a positive mood."
SEE ALSO: Trudeau Visits Kyiv And Pledges More Military AidLater on June 10 in his nightly video address, Zelenskiy cited the eastern and southern fronts, where fighting is heaviest.
"Thank you to all those who hold their positions and those who advance," he said.
Earlier on June 10 a UN official warned of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the demise this week of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River.
Floodwaters receded slightly in some parts of southern Ukraine but surged in others early in the day as rescue efforts continued and Ukraine's nuclear energy agency put the last operating reactor at Europe's largest nuclear plant into "cold shutdown" as a safety precaution after the breach of the dam.
Ukraine's Enerhoatom nuclear energy agency said it had put the last of six reactors at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant into "cold shutdown" two days earlier to counter the danger from the flooding and decline of water levels at the nearby Kakhovka reservoir.
Cold shutdown is when control rods are introduced into a reactor's core to prevent the nuclear fission reactions that normally generate power.
More than 10,000 residents of a region downstream from the major southern city of Kherson were said to have been cut off from the rest of Ukraine as flooding extended to the Inhulets River, a tributary of the Dnieper.
The head of the regional military administration in the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram that 35 settlements have been flooded on the right bank of the Dnieper, and 3,763 houses are under water.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry reported that at least 27 people were missing in flooded areas of Kherson.
The breach of the Kakhovka dam early this month is feared to be one of Europe's biggest environmental and industrial disasters in decades.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) has said it intercepted telephone communications between Russian military personnel that "confirm" Russia's involvement in the destruction of the dam, which has been under Russian control since early in the invasion, but Moscow continues to deny responsibility.