Bloodbath grinds on in Ukraine city

Both Ukraine and Russia on Sunday reported high casualties in Ukraine’s Donetsk region as the slow and bloody fight for the town of Bakhmut continues.

Ukrainian forces control the west of the now-ruined and nearly deserted Bakhmut, while Russia’s Wagner Group controls most of the eastern part, British intelligence said, with the Bakhmutka River that bisects the town marking the front line.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had suffered more than 1,100 dead in the past few days.

He said Russian forces had also sustained 1,500 “sanitary losses” — soldiers wounded badly enough to keep them out of further action.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces were conducting further operations in the Donetsk region.

The ministry said Russian forces had killed more than 220 Ukrainian service members over the past day.

Both sides have admitted to suffering and inflicting significant losses in Bakhmut over the past few months, while the exact number of casualties is difficult to verify.

Ukraine has repeatedly said that the defense of Bakhmut would continue, with top commanders saying the fight there allows time needed to prepare a broader counterattack soon.

“On Bakhmut: The situation there is difficult, very difficult, the enemy is fighting for every meter,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, said Sunday in a voice recording published on the Telegram channel of his press service.

“And the closer to the city center, the fiercer the fighting.”

Moscow says capturing Bakhmut would punch a hole in Ukrainian defenses and be a step toward seizing all of the Donbas industrial region, a major target.