Russian forces kept pounding military positions and civilian settlements in eastern and southern Ukraine, Kyiv said on February 20, despite what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "extraordinarily significant" Russian losses in key disputed areas of the Donetsk region.
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Russia carried out 10 missile strikes and 25 air strikes in the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk region as well as the southern Zaporizhzhya region, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its daily report, adding that 62 attacks from multiple-rocket launchers were also registered along the front line.
"The enemy continues to focus its main efforts on conducting offensive actions in the Kupyansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, and Shakhtar directions," it said.
The General Staff said civilians were wounded and killed in the shelling, without offering details. It warned that the threat of Russian strikes remained high across Ukraine.
Zelenskiy on February 19 said Ukrainian forces had inflicted heavy losses on Russia’s military in the fighting in Donetsk around Bakhmut and Vuhledar, a town that is close to the dividing line between the eastern and the southern theaters of the war.
“The situation is very difficult,” Zelenskiy said in a video address on February 19. “We are breaking the occupier and are inflicting extremely significant losses on Russia. I repeat again and again: The more Russia loses there, the faster we will be able to end this war with the victory of Ukraine.”
Ukrainian military drone footage posted last week appeared to show that Russia lost nearly 30 armored vehicles, including tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, in fighting around Vuhledar, which had a population of about 14,000 before the war.
Ukraine reportedly has also suffered heavy losses, but neither side has provided casualty figures for its forces, and battlefield claim are difficult to independently verify.
During his previous nightly video address on February 18, Zelenskiy said Kyiv had “received strong signals from our partners and concrete agreements on the inevitability of holding Russia accountable for aggression and terror against Ukraine and its people.”
He added that such commitments apply “not only to the evil that Russia has brought since February 24, [2022], but also since 2014,” referring to Moscow’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its fomenting of a separatist war in parts of eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities in the southern region of Kherson said Russian shelling struck the yard of a house in a nearby village, killing three adult members of one family and that four others, including two children, were injured.
"Russian occupiers killed a family in the Kherson region," officials said in a statement. "Three people died at the scene of the tragedy: the father, the mother, and an uncle."
Russian troops were forced to flee Kherson city in November in a major battlefield loss in the south for Moscow.
Over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference -- where discussions about Ukraine dominated events -- U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said that “the U.S. has formally determined that Russia committed crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.
“Justice must be served,” she added, listing allegations of “murder, torture, rape, and deportation.”