Ukraine: Aerial drone footage shows scale of Bakhmut’s destruction
BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Amid the smoking ruins, a lone dog pads in the snow, surely unaware death rains down regularly from the skies on the remnants of this Ukrainian city that Russia is pounding into rubble.
But for now Bakhmut stands — growing as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance with each additional day that its defenders hold out against Russia’s relentless shelling and waves of Russian troops taking heavy casualties in a months-long but so far futile campaign to capture it.
New video footage of Bakhmut shot from the air with a drone for The Associated Press shows how the longest battle of the yearlong Russian invasion has turned the city of salt and gypsum mines in eastern Ukraine into a ghost town, its jagged destruction testament to the folly of war.
The footage — shot Feb. 13 — shows no people. But they are still there — somewhere, out of sight, in basements and defensive strongholds, trying to survive. Of the prewar population of 80,000, a few thousand residents have refused or been unable to evacuate. The size of the garrison that Ukraine has stationed in the city is kept secret.
Tire tracks on the roads and footprints on the paths covered with snow speak to a continued human presence. In one shot, a car drives swiftly away in the distance. Graffiti spraypainted on the charred, pockmarked outer walls of a blown-out storefront also show people are or were here.
“Bakhmut loves Ukraine,” it reads. Next to that is the stencilled face of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, holding up two fingers in a V-for-victory gesture. “God and Valerii Zaluzhnyi are with us,” reads writing underneath.
A top Ukrainian intelligence official this week likened the fight for Bakhmut to Ukraine’s dogged defense of Mariupol earlier in the war, which tied up Russian forces for months, preventing the Kremlin from deploying them elsewhere.
Likewise, “Bakhmut is also an indicator and a fortress,” the official, Vadym Skibitskyi, said in an AP interview. He said the city has come to represent “the indomitability of our soldiers” and that by holding it, Ukraine is inflicting “unacceptable” casualties on the Russians.
From the air, the scale of destruction becomes plain to see. Entire rows of apartment buildings have been gutted, just the outer walls left standing and the roofs and interior floors gone, exposing the ruins’ innards to the snow and winter frost — and the drone’s prying eye.