Ukraine reclaims more settlements in south

Ukraine said yesterday it reclaimed more territory from Russia in the south and welcomed the delivery of Western air defence systems that Kyiv said would usher in a "new era" after mass strikes from Moscow.

Russia for two days pummelled Ukraine with missiles, damaging energy facilities nationwide, in attacks that President Vladimir Putin said were retaliation for a deadly explosion at the Crimea bridge.

Russia's FSB security service said yesterday it detained eight suspects over the blast that ripped through the road and rail bridge connecting Crimea to the rest of the country.

But it also claimed to have foiled two more attacks that Ukrainian special services allegedly planned to carry out on Russian territory.

"The whole activity of the FSB and Investigative Committee is nonsense," Ukraine's public broadcaster Suspilne cited the interior minister spokesperson, Andriy Yusov, as saying when asked about Moscow's allegations on the Crimea Bridge blast.

Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said yesterday after Russia's missile barrage that Ukraine's Western backers were looking to provide Kyiv with more air defences to protect against Russia's "indiscriminate" attacks across the country.

Putin has vowed a "severe" response to any further attack on Russia and what Moscow considers to be its territory, including the Crimea peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The Russian military meanwhile said it had fended off Ukrainian attacks in the eastern Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv regions.

And Russian strikes on the frontline town of Avdiivka killed at least eight people at a market, the Ukraine-appointed chief of the region said.

"There is no military logic to this kind of shelling, only the unbridled desire to kill as many of our people as possible and intimidate others," the Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on social media.