Russian forces try to encircle embattled Bakhmut
City has become focus of broad offensive in the east by Moscow
Russian forces are attacking Bakhmut from three directions in a persistent attempt to encircle Ukrainian troops, the Ukrainian military said Sunday, maintaining pressure on the battered city that has become the focal point of Moscow’s wide-ranging offensive in eastern Ukraine.
In an indication of the severity of the fighting in the east of the country and its broad geographical reach, the Ukrainian military’s General Staff said Sunday that its forces had repelled 130 Russian attacks Saturday.
“The adversary continues its attempts to encircle the town of Bakhmut,” it said in a morning update, listing attacks on a string of small towns and settlements near Bakhmut.
The fighting Saturday killed two civilians in Bakhmut, the head of the regional Ukrainian military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Sunday in a post on the Telegram social messaging app. Seven civilians were wounded in the region, he added.
Before the war, Bakhmut had a population of about 70,000, but Ukrainian authorities say only a few thousand civilians remain.
Mick Ryan, a military analyst and retired Australian army major general who is a fellow at the Lowy Institute, a think tank based in Sydney, wrote Sunday that Russian forces, despite heavy losses, had “slowly but surely begun to take ground in and around Bakhmut.”
If Russia does eventually capture Bakhmut, questions would remain about Russia’s ability to sustain its offensive and gain further ground in eastern Ukraine.
“The reality is that if the Russians do capture Bakhmut, they are seizing rubble,” Ryan said. “It is a town with minimal strategic importance, with almost no remaining infrastructure to support an occupying force. That the Russians have invested so much in its capture speaks volumes about their poor strategy in this war.”
Elsewhere on the long front line, Moscow has continued to shell civilian areas in Ukraine over the past few weeks as its offensive has ramped up, often with devastating consequences.
Russian shelling also killed a woman and two children Sunday in the village of Poniativka in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, according to regional authorities. And the death toll from a missile strike on an apartment building Thursday in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine rose to 13.