Ukraine fighting 'intense' battles in Donetsk region

Ukraine said on Friday that Russian forces had concentrated their firepower on the Pokrovsk front in the eastern Donetsk region, where overnight strikes wounded at least six people.

The Kremlin annexed the industrial territory in late 2022, months after invading, and its forces are making incremental gains there.

"The Pokrovsk front... is the most intense in terms of enemy attacks," the Ukrainian military said in a briefing.

In the war-battered town of Selydove near the front line in Donetsk, officials said six people were wounded by Russian aerial attacks overnight.

AFP journalists on the scene hours after the attack saw the interior of a supermarket reduced to heaps of metal and glass under a partially gutted roof.

The force of the explosion, which tore open a neighbouring building, also blew out the windows of residential buildings across the street.

Oleg, a 57-year-old resident, said he heard a strange noise at around 9.00 pm on Thursday evening.

He thought it was several helicopters flying overhead, until he saw the explosion.

Lyudmila, still in shock, assessed the damage in her flat where the windows had been blown out by the blast.

"Everything was blown away," the 68-year-old told AFP, her face bruised by the blast.

Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight, damaging a fuel reservoir site in a Russian border region.

The two sides have stepped up cross-border aerial assaults in recent weeks, with Kyiv targeting Russian energy facilities and Moscow launching retaliatory barrages.

Russia said it had downed 87 Ukrainian drones, of which 70 had targeted the southern Rostov region that houses the headquarters of its military operation against Ukraine.

The defence ministry said 70 drones were downed over Rostov, six each over Kursk and Voronezh, two each over Volgograd and the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, and one over the annexed Crimean peninsula.

The attacks sparked power cuts in several areas of the Rostov region, its governor Vasily Golubev said on social media.

In the Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine, a fuel reservoir was slightly damaged by falling debris, its regional governor Alexander Gusev said.

Kyiv meanwhile said Ukrainian air defence systems had downed 24 out of 31 Russian drones and missiles fired overnight.

Three people were wounded in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes were damaged in the neighbouring Kharkiv region.