Ukraine war: 'Almost no life left' in Bakhmut and five other top developments
Russian forces are escalating their onslaught against Ukrainian positions around the wrecked eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian officials said, bringing new levels of death and devastation in the grinding, months-long battle.
“Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Monday of the scene around Bakhmut and the nearby town of Soledar.
“The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes,” Zelenskyy said. “This is what madness looks like.”
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated more than two months ago that 90% of Bakhmut’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said Russia has thrown “a large number of storm groups” into the battle.
“The enemy is advancing literally on the bodies of their own soldiers and is massively using artillery, rocket launchers and mortars, hitting their own troops,” she said.
Russian troops, alongside soldiers from the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, have advanced in recent days in Soledar and “are likely in control of most of the settlement,” the UK Defence Ministry tweeted Monday.
It said that taking Soledar -- 10 kilometres north of Bakhmut -- is likely Moscow’s immediate military objective and part of a strategy to encircle Bakhmut.
But it added that “Ukrainian forces maintain stable defensive lines in depth and control over supply routes” in the area.
An exceptional feature of the fighting near Bakhmut is that some of the fighting has been around entrances to disused salt mine tunnels, which run for some 200 kilometres underneath the area, the British
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