Over the past day, the Russian army has carried out about 100 shellings on the front in eastern Ukraine, almost half of them in the Mariinsky direction, a new “hot spot” along with the Avdiyivka region, the Ukrainian army said on Friday, according to AFP and Agerpres.

The enemy made 43 attempts to break through the defense of our troops in the Maryinka area of ​​the Donetsk region, according to the daily summary of the General Staff of Ukraine.

The completely destroyed city of Maryinka was taken under the control of the Russian army in December. Since then, the front in the area has been largely frozen, but in recent days Moscow has stepped up its attacks to the west.

The Ukrainian General Staff mentions the towns of Novomykhailivka and Pobieda, a village the Russian army announced it had captured on Thursday, days after capturing Avdiivka after months of bloody fighting.

“We are focusing not only on the Avdiiv direction, because we have another hot spot, first of all, we have the Mariinsky direction,” Dmytro Ligovii, the spokesman for the operational management in this direction, said on Thursday evening.

“Both in the Avdiiv and Mariinsky directions, our military restored several positions, and especially in the Avdiiv direction, where about 12 Russian invaders surrendered or were captured by our servicemen,” he clarified.

The Ukrainian General Staff also records 16 shellings in the Bakhmut direction and 14 in the Lyman direction.

Ukraine’s air force said it had destroyed 23 of 31 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Russia, along with six missiles, last night over several cities in southern Ukraine, including Odesa, where three people were killed.

Ukraine’s armed forces, which lack ammunition and Western aid, are facing an “extremely difficult” situation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself admitted, as Saturday marks two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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