• Ukrainian troops stormed Wagner’s base in eastern Ukraine.
• A hotel in Kadiivka, district of Luhansk, where the gang was located, was hit.
• There were huge Russian losses, governor Serhiy Haidai said.

Ukrainian soldiers have attacked a headquarters of the Russian Wagner mercenary outfit in eastern Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk.

Serhiy Haidai reported that a hotel in Kadiivka, district of Luhansk, where the gang was located, was hit. There were huge Russian losses, he continued.

Wagner’s presence at the hotel was unable to be independently confirmed by the Media.

Western experts claim that Wagner are state-sponsored mercenaries who serve the Kremlin.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former restaurateur and close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, founded the private military firm, which has been regularly accused of war crimes and violations of human rights.

Previous deployments of Wagner units included the Central African Republic, Mali, Libya, Syria, the Crimea, and Syria.

Mr. Haidai said that Russia had suffered “major losses” in the Kadiivka attack and predicted that “at least 50%” of the remaining fighters would perish from a lack of medical care.

The attack on the hotel occurred as violence also erupted in southern Ukraine, with Russia firing drones at Odesa and Ukraine retaliating near Melitopol.

The Ukrainian army reported on Saturday that it had shot down 10 drones, and that an additional five had attacked energy installations, knocking out electricity to about 1.5 million people.

“The situation in the Odesa region is very difficult,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address.

“Unfortunately the hits were critical, so it takes more than just time to restore electricity. It doesn’t take hours, but a few days.”

According to Ukrainian officials, Russian drones built in Iran attacked critical infrastructure.

Pro-Moscow officials in Melitopol reported that a Ukrainian missile attack left two persons dead and 10 injured. A large fire was visible in pictures posted by a Moscow-installed official there.

“Air defense systems destroyed two missiles, four reached their targets,” Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russia-installed governor of the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He added that a “recreation center” where people were dining had been destroyed in the attack, and that Ukrainian forces had used US-supplied Himars rocket launchers.

The counteroffensive by Ukraine has been greatly aided by the employment of this weapon, which has been employed to target areas away from the front lines, such as Russia’s command centers.

The exiled mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, claimed that numerous “invaders” had been killed.

Since the beginning of March, Melitopol has been occupied and has become a key logistical base for the Russian forces in the southeast.

Strategically situated between Mariupol to the east, Kherson and the Dnipro River to the west, and Crimea to the south, the city lies in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Winter has arrived, but according to Ukraine, its operations to recover occupied land are still ongoing.

Most of the fighting in recent weeks has occurred in the country’s east, particularly in the area of the Donetsk region’s city of Bakhmut.

However, on Saturday night, President Zelensky’s advisor Oleksiy Arestovych suggested that Melitopol might be a key location for Ukrainian forces.

“If Melitopol falls, the entire defense line all the way to Kherson collapses,” he said in an interview.

If that happened, he added, “Ukrainian forces would gain a direct route to Crimea,” the peninsula Russia invaded and annexed in 2014 and that the Ukrainians have vowed to retake.

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