Ukraine attacks a Russian-occupied city, causing a massive explosion

The Ukrainian army launched a night attack on the Russian-held city of Makiivka, showing it can still strike targets deep behind Russian lines as its troops fight in grueling trench warfare in a counter-offensive to reclaim land.

Both Ukrainian and Russian officials said Tuesday night’s attack in Makiivka was significant, but they differed on whether it hit a military or civilian area. And the strike had symbolic resonance, as Makiivka is where Ukraine inflicted Russia’s worst loss of life in a single attack in January since Moscow invaded nearly 18 months ago.

A video shared online by the Ukrainian military showed a huge fireball lighting up the night sky over Makiivka, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. The army said a “Russian base” in the city had “ceased to exist” thanks to Ukrainian forces, while Tass, Russia’s state news agency, reported that one man was killed and 68 civilians injured. Neither claim could be independently verified.

The attack came four weeks after Ukraine’s slow but intense campaign against Russian forces, who have dug in with miles of trenches and minefields across exposed open fields to the south and east. Since the start of the counter-offensive, Ukrainian forces have made small gains and on Wednesday, General Oleksiy Hromov, a deputy commander of operations in the army’s general staff, gave some details of their progress.

He said Ukraine had recaptured nine settlements in the past month, mostly small farming villages, and about 100 square kilometers. He also said the “hot contact” line, where Ukraine was in direct contact with Russian troops, was about 745 miles long.

The numbers could not be independently verified, but they seemed consistent with previous reporting by The New York Times — and with the bitter, meter-by-meter nature of the fighting as Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have described it. Russian officials have said Ukraine’s campaign is being turned down.

For months, as Ukraine prepared and launched its counter-offensive, attacking Russia before it — teetering on many fronts and capturing only the eastern city of Bakhmut — the two sides exchanged long-range strikes against targets far from the frontline.

While Ukraine has used Western-supplied weapons, such as the HIMARS missiles, to attack Russian supply lines and arms depots, Russia has regularly targeted civilian centers and bombed Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, 17 times in May alone.

While many of Russia’s missiles and drones have been shot down by Ukraine’s air defense systems, the strikes have left many Ukrainians in Kiev tense and ready to race to the bomb shelters. Nerves ran high again on Wednesday after a man detonated an explosive at a city courthouse, sparking a standoff that ended with his death and two officers injured. Authorities did not name the man and his case appeared to have nothing to do with the war.

During the attack on Makiivka on Tuesday night, videos geolocated by The Times confirmed an explosion on the outskirts of the city: an initial explosion triggered several secondary explosions and flares before a much larger blast, suggesting the site may have been a weapons cache.

Russia’s Defense Ministry did not immediately comment on Ukraine’s claims about the attack, but pro-Russian officials in Makiivka accused Ukraine of using long-range missiles and artillery from the Western side to attack civilians. Bag quoted a local official, Igor Kimakovsky, as saying HIMARS missiles and artillery had hit “peaceful” areas of the city. Those claims also could not be independently verified.

It was a HIMARS attack that killed at least 63 Russian soldiers — and possibly hundreds more — in a barracks in Makiivka on New Year’s Day. The attack drew criticism of the Russian military from some influential supporters of Moscow’s war effort and led Russia’s Defense Ministry to claim it had carried out retaliatory strikes against Ukraine.

At the time, Russian authorities blamed their forces in Makiivka for disclosing their location using mobile phones, saying the data had enabled an attack by Ukrainian forces equipped with long-range weapons from Western allies.

Makiivka, near the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, is only about 10 miles from Ukrainian-occupied Avdiivka to the northwest — well within the roughly 50-mile range of the HIMARS missiles the United States has sent to Ukraine. The HIMARS system, military analysts say, is most effective against stationary targets that can be identified and located in advance, such as ammunition dumps, infrastructure and troop concentrations.

Anatoly Kurmanaev And Malachy Browne reporting contributed.