Russian forces have made progress in their campaign to capture the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, the focus of the war’s longest ground battle, but their assault will be difficult to sustain without more significant personnel losses, British military officials said Saturday. The UK defence ministry said in its latest assessment that paramilitary units from the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group have seized most of eastern Bakhmut, with a river flowing through the city now marking the front line of the fighting.
The mining city is located in Donetsk province, one of four regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year. Russia’s military opened the campaign to take control of Bakhmut in August, and both sides have experienced staggering casualties. Ukrainian troops and supply lines remain vulnerable to “continued Russian attempts to outflank the defenders from the north and south” as the Wagner Group’s forces try to close in on them in a pincer movement, the UK ministry said.
However, the ministry added, it will be “highly challenging” for Wagner’s soldiers to push ahead because Ukraine has destroyed key bridges over the river, while Ukrainian sniper fire from fortified buildings further west has made the thin strip of open ground in the city’s center “a killing zone.” Russian military bloggers and other pro-Kremlin Telegram accounts claimed on Friday that Russian forces had entered a metal processing plant in northwestern Bakhmut. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, also referenced geolocated footage showing Russian forces within 800 meters of the AZOM plant, a heavily built-up and fortified complex.
The institute reported in its Friday night assessment that Moscow’s apparent focus on capturing the plant, rather than opting for a “wider encirclement of western Bakhmut” by attempting to take nearby villages, was likely to bring a further wave of Russian casualties. Ukraine’s ground forces on Saturday signalled their intention to hold out in Bakhmut, announcing on Facebook that their top officer, Colonel Oleksandr Syrskyi, was personally overseeing “the most important sectors of the front” to deny Moscow a long-awaited battlefield victory. “Our military is standing. This is our fortress. And what they are doing now, we cannot even imagine how useful it will be for the country, for our army in the near future,” National Security and Defense Council secretary Oleksii Danilov said on Ukrainian state TV.
Quoting Syrskyi, he said the alleys and territory around Bakhmut were “littered with the corpses of Russians and Wagnerians”. Elsewhere in Ukraine, repair work continued Saturday following a massive Russian missile and drone strike two days earlier that killed six people and left hundreds of thousands without heat or electricity.
