Russia faces heavy losses at Bakhmut
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces have made progress in their campaign to capture the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, the focus of the war’s longest ground battle, but their assault will be difficult to sustain without more significant personnel losses, British military officials said Saturday.
The British Defense Ministry said in its latest assessment that paramilitary units from the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group have seized most of eastern Bakhmut, with a river flowing through the city now marking the front line of the fighting.
The mining city is located in Donetsk province, one of four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year. Russia’s military opened the campaign to take control of Bakhmut in August, and both sides have experienced staggering casualties.
Ukrainian troops and supply lines remain vulnerable to “continued Russian attempts to outflank the defenders from the north and south” as the Wagner Group’s forces try to close in on them in a pincer movement, the U.K. ministry said.
However, the ministry added, it will be “highly challenging” for Wagner’s soldiers to push ahead because Ukraine has destroyed key bridges over the river, while Ukrainian sniper fire from fortified buildings further west has made the thin strip of open ground in the city’s center “a killing zone.”
Russian military bloggers and other pro-Kremlin Telegram accounts claimed Friday that Russian forces had entered a metal processing plant in northwestern Bakhmut.
Ukraine’s top officer, Col. Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced on Facebook that he was personally overseeing “the most important sectors of the front” to deny Moscow access to Bakhmut, a long-awaited battlefield victory.
“Our military is standing. This is our fortress. And what they are doing now, we cannot even imagine how useful it will be for the country, for our army in the near future,” National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksii Danilov said on Ukrainian state TV.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, repair work continued Saturday following a Russian missile and drone strike two days earlier that killed six people and left hundreds of thousands without heat or electricity.
Ukraine’s state grid operator said power supply issues persisted across four provinces following the barrage, in which 80 Russian missiles and a smaller number of exploding drones hit residential buildings and critical infrastructure across the country.
In a Facebook post, Ukrenergo said scheduled blackouts remain in place in Kharkiv and Zhytomyr, as well as parts of the Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv regions. The company added that the situation in Zhytomyr was especially challenging, with some customers still without power.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces reported that Russia launched 34 attacks from multiple rocket launchers Saturday on various parts of the country. They included southern Ukraine’s Kherson province, where three people “who simply went to a store to buy groceries” were killed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Russian shelling between Friday morning and Saturday morning also killed at least five people and wounded another 19 across Kherson and Donetsk provinces, Ukrainian authorities reported.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces are attacking Kostiantynivka with cluster bombs and missiles. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of Donetsk province, said one person was killed and at least three civilians wounded after several rounds of Russian shelling Saturday.
An attack on the city a day earlier injured eight people and destroyed or damaged more than a dozen houses. The barrages have overwhelmed local firefighters, who take great risks putting out fires in buildings and cars even as the shelling continues.
It’s unclear whether the blasts are a new wave of attacks or secondary explosions caused by fires in the area. Either way, the explosions are getting too close, and the leader of the team orders everyone back to the truck.
Norwegian Defense Minister Bjorn Arild Gram announced Norway’s decision to earmark $7.5 billion over the next five years for weapons and other aid for Ukraine.
According to a readout of the meeting published by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Gram said the arms Norway planned to send included missile launchers and ammunition for NASAMS anti-aircraft systems.
Reznikov said Ukrainian troops successfully operated some of the same weapons to shoot down the drones and missiles that Russia rained Thursday on Ukraine.