Kiev, 4 February 2024 (dpa/MIA) - At least 20 people have been killed and 10 injured in the shelling of the eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk, which is occupied by Russian troops, local authorities said on Saturday.

"The Ukrainian forces shelled a bakery in Lysychansk, civilians are among the rubble," wrote Leonid Pasechnik, the head of pro-Russian separatists forces in the Luhansk region, on his Telegram channel.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman referred to "terrorist acts by Ukrainian neo-Nazis."

Kiev knew that there were many people in the bakery at the time and had deliberately chosen this target, Zakharova said.

She called for international condemnation of the attack, especially in the West, as Lysychansk had been attacked with Western weapons systems.

It was not possible to independently verify the conflicting reports on the number of casualties. Ukraine has not yet commented on the attack.

Before the war, Lysychansk was a large city of about 100,000 residents. It was taken by Russian troops in the summer of 2022 after heavy fighting and is heavily affected by the war which began almost two years ago. Lysychansk is about 10 kilometres from the front line.

Earlier Saturday, officials said that Russia and Ukraine damaged each other's infrastructure during night-time drone and missile attacks

"A fire broke out at the Volgograd oil refinery after a drone was shot down," the governor of the Russian region, Andrey Bocharov, said in a post on Telegram. He said the fire was swiftly contained and that there had not been any deaths or injuries. The Russian Ministry of Defence said seven drones had been shot down.

Four aerial objects were intercepted over the south-west Russian region of Belgorod and one over the Rostov-on-Don region to the south, according to the military, both areas border Ukraine. Two more were shot down over the Volgograd region, the army said. No information was available on any possible damage.

Kiev said Ukraine faced night-time attacks with 14 drones and 2 Ovod missiles, Russian cruise missiles known in NATO as Kingbolt. As the previous night, energy supply sites in the industrial region of Dnipropetrovsk were the main target of the attacks.

The Ukrainian army said nine drones were intercepted. Military Governor Serhiy Lysak also reported two fires. "Almost 15,000 people are without electricity in the district. And also two heating plants in Kryvyi Rih, which supplied 43,000 people," he wrote on Telegram. Some of the city's trams were cancelled and several households also lost their water supply.

Russia has frequently fired missiles and drones at the Ukrainian hinterland, often focusing on energy supply facilities in a bid to weaken the nation through the loss of power during the winter months.

Meanwhile, the Russian government accused Washington of provoking Kiev into continuing the war after US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland visited Ukraine.

That means "the Americans are inflicting more pain on the Ukrainians and the Americans are causing more Ukrainians to die," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television correspondent Pavel Zarubin, who published the footage on Telegram on Saturday.

The US is directly involved in the conflict and is becoming more and more entangled in it, said Peskov, who said he was confident this would not change the outcome of the war.

The Kremlin consistently claims that many casualties in the nearly two-year war are due to the West helping Kiev fend off the attacks from Russia.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

MIA file photo