KYIV - Ukrainian forces are repelling constant attacks on the town of Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region and holding their positions in nearby Soledar in very difficult conditions, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday, as Kyiv rejected as “nonsense” a Russian claim that Kremlin troops killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers overnight.

“Bakhmut is holding on despite everything. And even though most of the town has been destroyed by Russian strikes, our soldiers are repelling constant Russian attempts to advance,” he said in his nightly video address.

“Soledar is holding on, even though there is even greater destruction and things are very difficult.”

Mr Zelensky issued a fresh denunciation of what he said was Russia’s failure to observe a truce it had proclaimed for Orthodox Christmas by staging attacks on Ukrainian cities.

“Russians were shelling Kherson with incendiary ammunition immediately after Christmas,” he said, referring to a city in the south abandoned by Russian forces in November.

“Strikes on Kramatorsk and other cities in Donbas - on civilian targets and at the very time when Moscow was reporting a supposed ‘silence’ for its army.”

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that a missile attack on Kramatorsk, northwest of Bakhmut, had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers, but a Reuters reporter at the scene found no obvious signs of casualties.

Russia described the attack as a “retaliatory strike” following Ukraine’s New Year’s Eve missile salvo in the eastern Ukrainian town of Makiivka, which Moscow said killed 89 of its soldiers.

Ukraine’s armed forces rejected Russia’s claim about the Kramatorsk attack.

“This is nonsense,” said Mr Sergiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the eastern group of the Ukrainian armed forces. “This information is as true as the data that they have destroyed all of our HIMARS,”

In the attack on Makiivka, Ukraine used US-supplied HIMARS missiles. Mr Cherevaty added that Russia could not deliver high-precision strikes. REUTERS