Battle for Bakhmut `very tough'

Russian forces are ratcheting up pressure on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, pouring in waves of fighters to break Ukraine's resistance and targeting its supply lines in a bloody campaign aimed at securing Moscow's first significant battlefield victory in months.

Eleven months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, Bakhmut and surrounding areas have become an epicenter of fighting, their importance growing as both sides have added forces to the battle. Russia and Ukraine are each believed to be preparing for larger offensives as warmer spring temperatures arrive, and as Kyiv's Western allies try to rush armored vehicles and other heavy weapons to the front.

Russia has intensified its effort to capture Bakhmut — which it sees as key to President Vladimir Putin's objective of seizing the entire Donbas area in the east — after months of bombardment beginning in the summer yielded little progress.

Civilians have streamed out of Bakhmut under Russian shelling, abandoning a city that before the war had a population of about 70,000, as the armies fought a series of battles in surrounding towns and villages that left heavy casualties on both sides.

Despite suffering setbacks elsewhere in eastern Ukraine and in the south, since last fall, Moscow's troops edging toward Bakhmut from the east have gradually squeezed the city. This month, Russian forces took the salt mining town of Soledar, six miles to the northeast. They have also cut off a road running north toward the town of Siversk.

Bakhmut's strategic value, military analysts say, is as a crossroads for some of the region's highways. Capturing the city would not guarantee that Russia could make major advances in the east, but would put its forces in better position to do so.

To the south, Ukrainian soldiers who recently left the front line said that a paved road that had been their main supply route into Bakhmut was now within range of Russian artillery and tanks, though still in Ukrainian hands. This leaves Ukraine relying on a road west to the town of Chasiv Yar, itself the target of frequent Russian attacks, and this road is harder to traverse.

“The situation is very tough,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said in his nightly address Sunday after meeting with military leaders that focused on the fighting in Donetsk, one of two regions that make up Donbas.