Aid groups and civilians will not be able to enter Bakhmut starting on Monday, Ukraine’s military said, as fighting continued to intensify in Russia’s monthslong campaign to seize the strategic city in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Army said that it would no longer allow aid groups in the city because of the danger posed by street fighting.

The ban on volunteer access could suggest a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal, although the Ukrainian military has insisted it retains control of the city, can resupply troops and can evacuate its own wounded.

After months of withering bombardment, Russian forces, including both regular troops and mercenaries from the Wagner private military company, now appear to have surrounded Bakhmut on three sides.

Ukraine’s military said that street fighting had commenced in two neighbourhoods, and that the one remaining road that Ukrainian forces use to gain access to the city was under Russian fire.

Speaking in a video address posted online, a Ukrainian commander who goes by the nickname Madyar said the ban on aid organisations entering Bakhmut was necessary because the fighting now “exposes to danger even volunteers who come here with good intentions to help”.

The decision to close access to the city for aid groups suggests that the Ukrainian military cannot secure even areas in the city that for months had been considered relatively safe, such as neighborhoods on the western bank of the Bakhmutka river, which are farther from the range of Russian artillery strikes.

It was yet another indication that Russian forces were edging closer to taking the city.

Ukraine has made Bakhmut, a midsize city in the Donbas region with a pre-war population of about 70,000, into a symbol of its tenacious resistance to the Russian onslaught in eastern Ukraine.

The city lies in ruins, and just a few thousand civilians remain there.

New York Times News Service