Nearly 400 shelling incidents were recorded in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, the country’s President said, as fierce battles there persist despite the onset of winter weather.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that although there had been fewer attacks on Sunday “due to the deterioration of the weather”, the number of shelling incidents was still, “unfortunately, extremely high”.

“There have been almost 400 shelling occasions in the east since the beginning of the day,” he said in his nightly address, without elaborating. He said the fiercest fighting was in the Donetsk region. That’s the area that Zelensky described last week as a “hell” because of Russian attacks, drawing attention to one of the war’s most entrenched battlegrounds even as the country celebrated the recapture of the southern city of Kherson.

The Kremlin announced in April that its military priority was to capture all of Donetsk and the neighbouring region of Luhansk.

(New York Times News Service)