KYIV: Fighting around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is “extremely intense,” a Ukrainian military official said Tuesday, although little territory has changed hands between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the situation in Bakhmut “is getting more and more complicated.”
He said Russian forces are “constantly destroying everything that can be used to protect our positions.”
Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said on social media, “Despite taking significant losses, the enemy has dispatched its best-trained Wagner assault units to try to break through the defenses of our troops and surround the city.”
He was referring to the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary unit fighting alongside Russian troops.
Russia has been intensifying its attacks on several areas in eastern Ukraine, including Bakhmut, the ruined city where 75,000 people once lived.
Fighting for months has focused on towns and villages around Bakhmut, with Moscow attempting to surround the city to cut off Ukrainian supply routes, although some fighting has occurred within the city itself.
After failing a year ago to quickly take Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in the earliest days of the war, Russia has concentrated its fight in the eastern Donbas region. Both sides have sustained heavy casualties in the warfare.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based research organization, said in a new report Tuesday that 60,000 to 70,000 Russian troops have been killed in the last year, more combat deaths than Moscow sustained in all the conflicts it has fought since World War II combined, including in Chechnya and Afghanistan.
(VOA)
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