Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, said Russia has thrown “a large number of storm groups” into the fight for the city.
“The enemy is advancing literally on the bodies of their own soldiers and is massively using artillery, rocket launchers and mortars, hitting their own troops,” she said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Donetsk region’s Kyiv-appointed governor, on Tuesday described the Russian attacks on Soledar and Bakhmut as relentless.
“The Russian army is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble using all kinds of weapons in their scorched-earth tactics,” Kyrylenko said in televised remarks. “Russia is waging a war without rules, resulting in civilian deaths and suffering.”
Wounded soldiers arrive around the clock for emergency treatment at a Ukrainian medical stabilisation centre near the front line around Bakhmut. Medics fought for 30 minutes on Monday to save a soldier, but his injuries were too severe.
Another soldier suffered a head injury after a fragment pierced his helmet. Medics quickly stabilised him enough to transfer him to a military hospital.
“We fight to the end to save a life,” Kostyantyn Vasylkevich, a surgeon and the centre’s coordinator, told The Associated Press. “Of course, it hurts when it is not possible to save them.”
The Moscow-backed leader of the occupied areas of Donetsk said Russia’s forces were “very close” to taking over Soledar. But the gains were coming “at a very high price,” Denis Pushilin told Russian state TV.
Control over the city would create “good prospects” for taking over Bakhmut, as well as Siversk, a town further north where Ukrainian fortifications “are also quite serious,” Pushilin said.
The UK Defence Ministry concurred with that appraisal of the battle developments. Russian troops alongside soldiers from the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, have advanced in Soledar and “are likely in control of most of the settlement”, the ministry tweeted on Tuesday.
It said that taking Soledar, 10km north of Bakhmut, was likely Moscow’s immediate military objective and part of a strategy to encircle Bakhmut. But it added that “Ukrainian forces maintain stable defensive lines in depth and control over supply routes” in the area.
The Wagner Group’s leader, Dmitry Prigozhin, confirmed in a post on a Russian social media platform Tuesday that his forces are fighting in the area and acknowledged “heavy battles” in Soledar against a Ukrainian army he said “bravely fights”.
A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Wagner Group “has moved from being a niche sideshow of Russia’s war to a major component of the conflict”, adding its forces now make up as much as a quarter of Russian combatants.
An exceptional feature of the fighting near Bakhmut is that some of it has taken place around entrances to disused salt mine tunnels which run for some 200km, the British intelligence report noted.
“Both sides are likely concerned that [the tunnels] could be used for infiltration behind their lines,” it said.
In Russia, two signs emerged on Tuesday that officials were grappling with the military shortcomings revealed during the conflict in Ukraine.
Russian Defence Minister Shoigu, whose performance has been fiercely criticised in some Russian circles but who has retained Russian President Vladimir Putin’s confidence, said on Tuesday his military would use its experience in Ukraine to improve combat training.
Military communications and control systems will be improved using artificial intelligence, Shoigu said, and troops will be given better tactical gear and equipment.
The second indication of trouble involves Russia’s production of weapons and other supplies its military needs for the fight in Ukraine. The deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that officials who failed to meet deadlines for such items could face criminal charges.
Putin appointed Medvedev last month to head a new commission tasked with trying to solve the military’s supply problems. Numerous reports have suggested Russia is running low on certain weapons and was sending some troops into battle with insufficient equipment and clothing.
Part of the Kremlin’s challenge is keeping up with the weapons and supplies that Western allies have provided to Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that Nato members “have become a party to the conflict, pumping weapons, technology and intelligence data into Ukraine”.
Several front-line cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces have witnessed intense fighting in recent months.
Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, a broad industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive captured almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk escaped the same fate, and the Russian military subsequently poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut.
Taking Bakhmut would disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk.
Like Mariupol and other contested cities, Bakhmut has endured a long siege without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
Kyrylenko, the Donetsk region’s governor, estimated more than two months ago that 90 per cent of Bakhmut’s prewar population of more than 70,000 had fled since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
Ukraine’s presidential office said at least four civilians were killed and another 30 wounded in Russian shelling between Monday and Tuesday.
Vitaliy Kim, the governor of the southern Mykolaiv region, said Russian forces shelled the port of Ochakiv and the area around it late Monday and again early Tuesday. He said 15 people, including a 2-year-old child, were wounded in Monday’s shelling. - AP
