Russia, Ukraine spar over fighting near nuclear facility

 Russia, Ukraine spar over fighting near nuclear facility

Two villages close to the Ukrainian border had to be evacuated due to a fire at a Russian ammunition storage, an official said on Friday, and two people were reportedly hurt by Russian shelling close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station as both sides traded allegations about fighting there.

The structure housing the munitions storage caught fire late on Thursday in the Russian Belgorod region, close to the settlement of Timonovo and the border with Ukraine.

Timonovo and Soloti, located around 25 kilometres from the border, are home to about 1,100 people. According to regional governor of Belgorod Vyacheslav Gladkov, nobody was wounded.

A other ammo storage in the Crimean Peninsula, a Russian-occupied region on the Black Sea that Moscow annexed in 2014, exploded a few days before to the fire. Nine Russian jets were reportedly shot down at an airbase in Crimea last week, highlighting both the Russians' vulnerability and the Ukrainians' ability to launch attacks from behind their adversaries' lines.

The Ukrainian government has refrained from taking official responsibility. However, following the explosions in Crimea, which Russia has attributed to "sabotage," President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hinted at Ukrainian attacks behind enemy lines.

In televised remarks on Friday, Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister of Russia, claimed that Ukrainian officials' claims about attacking facilities in Crimea signalled "an escalation of the conflict openly encouraged by the United States and its NATO partners."

In phone conversations with high-ranking members of the Biden administration, Ryabkov claimed that Russian officials had warned the US against taking such actions. He added that "deep and open US involvement" in the war in Ukraine "effectively puts the US on the verge of becoming a party to the conflict."

Despite the most recent events, a Western official claimed that the battle is "almost operationally at a halt," with neither side able to launch significant offensives.

The official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss intelligence matters said, "The whole tempo of the campaign has slowed down, partly because both sides have become more conscious that this is a marathon not a sprint and that expenditure rates and conserving their munitions is important."

Later on Friday, a Ukrainian official claimed that two civilians had been hurt as a result of Russian bombardment on Ukrainian settlements close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. This is the most recent in a long line of similar claims made in recent weeks.