Russia’s conflict in Ukraine nears the eight-month mark. The situation in Donetsk, Bakhmut, and Nikopol

Ukrainian officials said Sunday that there had been rocket attacks from Russia that hit a town across from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

The attacks came as Russia’s war in Ukraine nears the eight-month mark. Kyiv also reported holding the line in continued fierce fighting around Bakhmut, where Russian forces have claimed some gains amid a seven-week Ukrainian counteroffensive that has led Russian troops to retreat in some other areas.

The key spots on the front line are neighboring towns. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke in a video address on Sunday about extremely heavy fighting in the Soledar and Bakhmut areas.

Those towns and Donetsk are in the industrialized Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv since 2014. Russia illegally annexed four areas last month.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of including convicts “with long sentences for serious crimes” in its front-line troops in return for pay and amnesty — something Western intelligence officials have also asserted.

In the east, Moscow was shelling towns and villages along the front line, as well as in the southern Kherson region.

Ukrainian officials say that the rockets at Nikopol caused damage to power lines, gas pipes, and businesses. Russia and Ukraine have both accused the other of shooting at and around the nuclear plant. The staff is run by pre-occupation Ukrainians.

The region of Zaporizhzhia also was illegally annexed by Russia last month, despite the fact that some 20% of it remains under Ukrainian military control.

Meanwhile, Russia opened an investigation into a shooting in that region Saturday in which two men from a former Soviet republic who were training at a military firing range killed 11 and wounded 15 during target practice, before being slain themselves. The Russian Defense Ministry called the incident a terrorist attack.

— France, seeking to puncture perceptions that it has lagged in supporting Ukraine, confirmed it’s pledging air-defense missiles and stepped-up military training to Ukraine. The French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in an interview that up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers will be embedded with military units in France over the course of several weeks for combat training, specialized training, and training on equipment supplied by France.

— The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, accused Moscow late Saturday of conducting “massive, forced deportations of Ukrainians,” which it said likely amount to ethnic cleansing.

It referenced statements made this week by Russian authorities that claimed that “several thousand” children from a southern region occupied by Moscow had been placed in rest homes and children’s camps amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The original remarks by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Marat Khusnullin, were reported by RIA Novosti on Friday.

Russian authorities have previously admitted to placing children from Russian-held areas of Ukraine, who they said were orphans, for adoption with Russian families, in a potential breach of an international treaty on genocide prevention.

The deputy defense minister of Ukraine stated in a statement that Ukrainian authorities cannot comment on specific weapons until the war is over and the country regains its sovereignty.

— A Russian commander wanted for his role in the downing of a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014 has been deployed to the front, according to social media posts by pro-Kremlin commentators. Posts by Maksim Fomin and others said Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, has been given responsibility for an unspecified Russian front-line unit.

The man on a wanted list for the downing of a plane has been accused of being involved in the deaths of more than 300 people. He is the most high profile suspect in a murder trial in a Dutch court, and he is expected to be sentenced in November.

In recent days, a number of Girkin’s posts have criticized Moscow’s battlefield failures. Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency said Sunday it would offer a $100,000 reward to anyone who captures him.

“Russia is extensively using the old styles, the most barbaric styles, of cluster munitions against Ukraine,” Goncharenko added. I was a victim of this. I was under fire. So we have all the right to use it against them.”

Biden’s request for war weapons from the Ukraine in the epoch of war: sources say the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is not concerned with the supply of arms

Senior Biden administration officials have been fielding this request for months and have not rejected it outright, CNN has learned, a detail that has not been previously reported.

The design of cluster bombs make them difficult to explode on impact and can pose a danger to anyone that comes in contact with them. Mark Hiznay, a weapons expert and the arms director for Human Rights Watch, told CNN previously that they created a bloody fragment because of the dozens of submunitions that explode at once across a large area.

The option of using military force is not off the table if the supplies run low. But sources say the proposal has not yet received significant consideration in large part due to the statutory restrictions that Congress has put on the US’ ability to transfer cluster munitions.

Those restrictions apply to munitions with a greater than one percent unexploded ordnance rate, which raises the prospect that they will pose a risk to civilians. In the near term, the administration has indicated to the Ukrainians that it is unlikely that President Joe Biden will be able to overrule that restriction.

The ability of the Ukrainians to make gains in the current conflict is not dependent on or related to their purchases of weapons, according to a congressional aide.

The Defense Ministry told CNN it doesn’t comment on reports regarding requests for weapons systems or other goods until an agreement with the supplier is reached.

“They [DPICMs] are more effective when you have a concentration of Russian forces,” the Ukrainian official told CNN, noting that Ukraine has been asking for the weapons “for many months.”

Earlier, Russia claimed that more than 600 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a Russian strike in Kramatorsk carried out in “retaliation” over the Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Makiivka last week, according to a statement from the Russian Defense Ministry.

A CNN team on the ground has seen no indication of any massive casualties in the area. There are no unusual things going on in and around Kramatorsk and the city mortuary is not one of them.

A reporter for the news service reported that there were no signs of Russians hitting two college dormitories that Russia claimed had been housing hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers.

The Makiivka strike took place just after midnight on New Year’s Day, targeting a vocational school housing Russian conscripts in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region, according to both Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts.

After the strike, there was a rare public blame game that broke out between Moscow and some pro-Kremlin leaders and military experts.

But that account was angrily dismissed by an influential military blogger and implicitly contradicted by the leader of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine, pointing to discord in the Russian command over Moscow’s response to the attack.

KYIV — A human rights group says it has documented “numerous cases” of Ukrainian forces firing land mines into territory that was controlled at the time by Russia.

The Izium area was liberated from Russian control by Ukrainian forces in September of 2022, shortly after Human Rights Watches interviews with several people. Researchers documented 11 cases of civilians injured by petal mines over the course of five months, including one man who eventually died.

Many mines reportedly ended up in private vegetable gardens, near sidewalks and on residential roofs, prompting Russian forces to dispatch demining teams and issue public safety notices. The residents reported that injured civilians were taken to Russia by the military.

Petal mines are often green or brown and blend in with the earth. They’re generally small, and can be launched with artillery from a distance. They flutter from the sky and can explode at the slightest touch. They are also made from the same material used in hollow plastic playground toys.

The Human Rights Watch Study of Izium Mines and its Implications for the Security and Security Status of the Ukrainian Armed Forces

The report cites Ukrainian medical workers who said they had to amputate limbs from almost as many as 50 people, including five children, as a result of mine injuries. NPR was also unable to reach the Emergency Services working in Izium.

Although the report said that Ukraine has destroyed 3.4 million antipersonnel mines, it revealed that the country still has 3.3 million of them.

The Ukrainian troops are staying committed to international law in the midst of the brutal war.

Human Rights Watch says its evidence of Ukrainian mining activity in Izium, however, is more unequivocal than past allegations of Ukrainian war crimes. The group is calling on the Ukrainian military to conduct an internal investigation into its adherence to the country’s international obligations.