Pleas for civilians to leave Bakhmut
Ukraine steps up efforts in key city
Ukrainian authorities are stepping up efforts to persuade the few thousand remaining civilians to leave Bakhmut in the face of a sustained Russian assault, a regional official said Tuesday, adding to signs that Kyiv may be preparing to retreat from a city it has defended fiercely for months.
The city, which had a prewar population of around 70,000, has steadily been emptying as the fighting has intensified. Fewer than 5,000 residents are still there, about 140 of them children, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional military administration.
In a further effort to reduce the number of civilians in the city, military authorities were permitting only people with special passes to return once they had left, Kyrylenko said in a national television broadcast. A day earlier, authorities barred aid workers from entering the city, saying it was too dangerous as Russian forces surrounded it on three sides.
“The military must focus on preparing defensive lines,” Kyrylenko said Tuesday.
An American paramedic was killed and several other aid workers were injured in an explosion in Bakhmut earlier this month while tending to a wounded civilian. Volunteers at the scene initially attributed the blast to indiscriminate Russian shelling. But a New York Times report says that a frame-byframe analysis of a video taken at the location — and shared with the Times — shows that Pete Reed, a former Marine volunteering in Ukraine as a paramedic and was unarmed, was killed in a targeted strike by a guided missile almost certainly fired by Russian troops.
It is unclear whether the Russians knew the group was made up of aid workers, according to the Times report. But its convoy had markings that should have signaled to the Russians the type of vehicles they were hitting. One of the vehicles was marked with a red cross, and the type of weapon used in the attack — a laser-guided antitank missile — is usually fired when a gunman sees and selects a target.
Bakhmut has been the focus of a grinding Russian campaign along the roughly 140-mile eastern front. Should the city fall, it would be Russia’s biggest battlefield victory in months and add to pressure on Ukraine’s Western allies to step up their support of Kyiv. Representatives of dozens of nations that have provided military and financial aid were meeting Tuesday in Brussels, discussing Ukraine’s urgent needs for ammunition and requests for even more advanced equipment, including aircraft.
Ukraine said it was still holding on in Bakhmut, but officials have said that battles have grown more intense.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address that the situation along the eastern front remained “extremely difficult.”
There were 37 separate clashes around Bakhmut in the previous 24 hours, Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, an armed forces spokesman, said on Ukrainian television. Part of the reason for the new rules on civilian access was to keep military operations secret, he said.
Months of conflict, Russian artillery attacks, and fierce fighting have shattered Bakhmut, cutting off power and water and making daily life virtually untenable for most civilians. Ukrainian authorities first ordered civilians to leave the surrounding Donetsk region this past summer, and many who remain are older people for whom health problems can make travel difficult.