A senior Russian defense official accused Ukrainian troops in control of parts of eastern Donetsk of pulling heavy artillery and military hardware to schools and nurseries.

Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev pointed out on Saturday that Ukrainian forces had not allowed evacuations from the cities of Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar, and Novoekonomichne, and apparently planned to use civilians as "human shields".

According to Mizintsev, "Ukrainian armed forces have holed up in Bakhmut’s School No 2, Chasiv Yar’s Vocational School No 22, and in Novoekonomichne’s Solnyshko kindergarten and School No 1. They are storing military equipment and rocket launchers on the grounds."

The Russian military has located Ukrainian military equipment in a nursery and a shipbuilding college in Mykolaiv in Donetsk and an arms depot in a school in the central city of Dnipro.

Mizintsev also mentioned that Ukrainian troops had bombed residential areas in the village of Mykolaivka in Lugansk, killing and wounding civilians.

The Colonel-General said that Ukrainian media workers and reporters from the New York Times had photographed the aftermath of the strikes and would likely blame them on Russia.

It is noteworthy that the Russian Armed Forces destroyed a huge batch of weapons and military equipment that were sent by the US and European countries to Ukrainian troops in Zhytomir Region, near the Malin railway station, with high-precision, long-range sea-based Kalibr missiles.

Amid a deadlock in negotiations to resolve the war in Ukraine between Kiev and Moscow, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said the crisis can only be resolved through "diplomacy".

Zelensky told a Ukrainian television channel that the end to the war will be through diplomacy. The war "will be bloody, there will be fighting but will only definitively end through diplomacy," he claimed, although it was Kiev that failed to provide an answer to the draft treaty that Russia had proposed.