Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military on Saturday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to beat after months of resistance.
The most recent battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on 4 provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to ascertain control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “stays very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a spotlight from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a very long time, there isn’t any living place left on the land of those areas which have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities which have again found themselves within the crosshairs. “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, one other Donbas city that the Russian army become burnt ruins.”
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill concerning the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured an extended siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated seven weeks ago that 90% of the town’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled within the months since Moscow focused on seizing all the Donbas.
The Ukrainian military General Staff reported missile attacks, about 20 airstrikes and greater than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine between Friday and Saturday. Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said essentially the most lively fighting was within the Bakhmut district, where greater than 20 populated places got here under fire. He said Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive succeeded in capturing just about all of Luhansk throughout the summer. Donetsk eluded the identical fate, and the Russian military in recent weeks has poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut in an try to encircle the town, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson nearly a month ago, the battle heated up around Bakhmut, demonstrating Putin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks in Ukraine.
Taking Bakhmut would rupture Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. Russia has battered Bakhmut with rockets for greater than half of the yr. A ground assault accelerated after its troops forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Luhansk in July.
But some analysts have questioned Russia’s strategic logic within the relentless pursuit to take Bakhmut and surrounding areas that also got here under intense shelling up to now weeks, and where Ukrainian officials reported that some residents were living in damp basements.
“The prices related to six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian troops also pressed their Donbas offensive within the direction of the Donetsk city of Lyman, which is 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bakhmut. In line with the ministry, they “managed to take more advantageous positions for further advancement.”
Russia’s forces first occupied the town in May but withdrew in early October. Ukrainian authorities said on the time they found mines on the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that were set to blow up when someone tried to clear the corpses, in addition to the bodies of civilian residents killed by shelling or who had died from a scarcity of food and medicine.
On Friday, Putin lashed out at recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine negotiated by France and Germany had bought time for Ukraine to arrange for war with Russia this yr.
That deal was aimed to chill tensions after pro-Russia separatists seized territory within the Donbas a yr earlier, sparking a war with Ukrainian forces that ballooned right into a war with Russia itself after the Feb. 24 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s military on Saturday also reported strikes in other provinces: Kharkiv and Sumy within the northeast, central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia within the southeast and Kherson within the south. The latter two, together with Donetsk and Luhansk, are the 4 regions Putin claims at the moment are Russian territory.
A month ago, Russian troops withdrew from the western side of the Dniper River which cuts through Kherson province, allowing Ukrainian forces to declare the region’s capital city liberated. However the Russians still occupy a majority of the province and have continued to attack from their news positions across the river.
Writing on Telegram, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said two civilians died and one other eight were wounded during dozens of mortar, rocket and artillery attacks over the day before today. Residential areas, a hospital, shops, warehouses and important infrastructure within the Kherson region were damaged, he said.
To the west, drone attacks overnight left much of Odesa province, including its namesake Black Sea port city, without electricity, regional Gov. Maxim Marchenko said. Several energy facilities were destroyed without delay, leaving all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations were without power, electric company DTEK said Saturday.
Citing the sheer “scale of the destruction,” the corporate said on Facebook that emergency crews were deployed and would start work to revive power as soon because the military provided authorization. Earlier Saturday, Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said Russian troops had attacked energy facilities within the Odesa region with explosive drones overnight.