Girl, 6, rescued from embattled Bakhmut as Russians close in
A SIX-YEAR-OLD child has been rescued from the embattled city of Bakhmut and reunited with her mother in a daring mission by Ukrainian police.
Russian sources yesterday claimed to have completed the encirclement of the city, the focus of a gruelling offensive for several weeks.
But Ukrainian soldiers told The Daily Telegraph that the claims were premature and a vital lifeline into the city was still open.
Alina, six, was reunited with her mother, Halyna Danylchenko, earlier this week after being driven out by two police officers who took her to the Ukrainian-held town of Sloviansk, Reuters reported.
As mother and daughter hugged, the girl said: “A shell exploded in our yard.”
“That’s why I got so worried,” replied Ms Danylchenko, who is 24 years old and eight months pregnant.
Some 200 children remain in the city, Ukrainian police said, despite the departure of almost all of the 70,000 original residents amid constant bombardment.
Fog hung heavy around the battle yesterday. At mid-morning, visibility on the T0504 highway connecting Bakhmut with the Ukrainian-held town of Kostiantinivka was down to 50 yards.
Humvees, lorries and cars in Ukrainian army service drove with their headlights on, but did not slow down.
“They’re shooting at this road all the time. You can still drive it if you go full speed. But you’re better off via the Chasiv Yar road,” a soldier, who had just left the embattled town, said.
Last week, Russian forces succeeded in flanking Bakhmut to the south and have spent the past several days trying to cut the TO504, and already have it under constant indirect fire. They are also targeting the Chasiv Yar road the soldier advised taking – a safer route of rutted country roads that runs parallel a few miles to the north. Journalists saw two civilian vehicles destroyed by shell fire there on Tuesday.
Every Ukrainian soldier here, from the lowliest squaddie to senior officers, understands the Russians want to cut both of the roads to place the contested city under a full siege.
At that point, the Ukrainians will probably have to abandon the city and retreat to a new line of defence, where the battle of attrition will begin anew.
Yesterday afternoon, one Russian official prematurely claimed the siege had been closed.
“Bakhmut is now operationally surrounded, our forces are closing the ring around the city,” said Yan Gagin, an aide to Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed head of Donetsk region.
“Fighting for control of the Chasiv Yar-bakhmut highway is now under way,” he added on state television.
But a Ukrainian officer who drove into and out of Bakhmut via the Chasiv
‘They’re shooting at this road all the time. You can still drive it if you go at full speed’
‘The Russians just send these guys with rifles at you, loads of them’
Yar road yesterday said he found the situation in the city “all right” and markedly improved on the previous day.
He said the Russians had been pushed back from some of the gains they made in a concerted assault on Tuesday and that shelling had dropped off. The Telegraph watched Ukrainian traffic moving unmolested on the southern highway.
Within three miles of the point where the Russians are trying to cut the T0504 no combat and only very distant and intermittent artillery fire was audible, suggesting Tuesday’s battle had petered out. It is possible the fog suppressed fighting by making targets invisible to drones.
The battle for Bakhmut is now the longest of the war and likely one of its bloodiest.
The soldier standing at the end of the road and his unit had left Bakhmut only recently after a two-month rotation during which they lost “a lot of guys.”
He and his comrades said “loads” of civilians remain in the town. “Where are they going to go?” he asked rhetorically.
Ukraine and its Western allies have played down Russia’s advances around Bakhmut.
British defence intelligence said Russia might continue to make “local gains” in the area but it was unlikely to have “sufficient uncommitted troops in the area to achieve an operationally significant breakthrough.”
However, Ukrainian forces are also under significant pressure. “The Russians just send these guys with rifles at you, loads of them. Without tanks, without armour support, without artillery, without anything,” said one soldier who fought in both Soledar and Bakhmut.
Most of those Russians get gunned down, he added. But then you find “you’re holding a corner so you can cover left or right. But to do that there should be someone on corners, covering your left and right. But there isn’t”.
“You might get artillery support once an hour. You ask for armour support and you’re told there isn’t any. You run out of ammo and you have to risk going back four or five kilometres over open ground to get more,” he said.
He said the fighting here was markedly more intense than in the battle for Kherson, where he said the Russians suffered a noticeable shortage of ammunition because of the supply bottlenecks at bridges over the Dnipro river.
But even he dismissed the Russian claim of an encirclement. “They’re nowhere near to that,” he said.