Ukrainian forces could be close to stabilizing the front lines in Bakhmut, the commander of the country’s armed forces said, as international aid workers warned that civilians remaining in the war-ravaged eastern city faced a dire humanitarian situation.
The battle for Bakhmut, which began in the summer, has become one of Russia’s longest-running and deadliest confrontations in the 13 months of war. The fighting in and around the city has been the most violent of recent months and does not appear to be letting up, with both Russian and Ukrainian officials expressing this past week an unwillingness to yield.
The Ukrainian commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Friday that, thanks to the “titanic efforts” of the city’s defenders, the situation “could be stabilized,” though he acknowledged the ferocity of the battle.
Other Ukrainian officials, backed by a report from British intelligence, maintained that the overall pace of Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine was subsiding, indicating that Moscow’s winter offensive may be running out of steam after heavy losses.
While Bakhmut’s strategic value has been questioned, its importance to the current phase of the conflict has only grown, given the heavy casualties sustained by both sides and its centrality in a broader assault on eastern Ukraine launched by Russian forces in recent weeks.
Russian troops breached vital supply lines to the city earlier this year, and at the time there was some evidence that Kyiv might be preparing to withdraw its forces. But Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited troops in the area this week, has vowed to hold the city. And some independent military experts have said in recent days that the Russians’ assault, in which they have attempted to outflank the city’s defenders, may be slowing.
Ukraine has for months urged civilians to leave Bakhmut as well as the broader areas of Donbas, which comprises the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, where Russia has held substantial territory since 2014. But many have stayed, and for those in Bakhmut and its surrounding area, daily life has played out against the backdrop of a relentless artillery barrage.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of Ukraine’s regional military administration in Donetsk, said on Saturday that Russian shelling over the past day had killed a civilian in the town of Horlivka, around 20 miles south of Bakhmut, and wounded a resident in Bakhmut. Across the country, 16 civilians died as a result of shelling over the past day, while 59 were injured, the military’s media channel said on Telegram on Saturday.
Many of those who remain are older or disabled people with low mobility and family members caring for them, Umar Khan, an official with the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a briefing on Friday.
“All you see are people pushed to the very limit of their existence and survival,” said Mr. Khan, who traveled with a Red Cross convoy that delivered aid to towns around Bakhmut this past week. “The sheer scale of destruction is shocking.”
The Red Cross said there were several thousand people living in Bakhmut, which had a prewar population of 70,000, and as many as 10,000 in nearby towns, mainly Kostiantynivka and Chasiv Yar. The group handed out basic goods this past week including hygiene kits, solar lamps and emergency drinking water.
A Ukrainian official recently put the number in Bakhmut at about 3,500 people, including 32 children, and officials have said that the remaining civilians are choosing to stay despite their best efforts to evacuate them, with some even hiding from police officers or emergency workers.
The Ukrainian military’s general staff said on Saturday morning that its forces had fought off 59 Russian assaults over the previous 24 hours along a stretch of the eastern front line that includes Bakhmut and the town of Avdiivka, around 50 miles south. That number appeared to be trending down when compared with the number of clashes recorded in recent weeks. In March, for example, the general staff reported more than 100 attacks.
A report from Britain’s Defense Intelligence Agency on Saturday echoed the sentiment.
“Russia’s assault on the Donbas town of Bakhmut has largely stalled,” the report said. “This is likely primarily a result of extreme attrition of the Russian force.” It added that Ukraine had sustained “heavy casualties.”
It was not possible to independently confirm the battlefield situation, and Maj. Rodion Kudriashov of Ukraine’s armed forces said that while the intensity of attacks had diminished, Russia still sought control of the city.
The decision by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to launch a full-scale invasion last February triggered a series of unforeseen geopolitical consequences, but in the last few months much of the actual fighting has played out in a series of small towns and cities in the east of the country.
In one example, Col. Oleksii Dmytrashkivskyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military, said that the fighting around Avdiivka, which has also been shattered by months of battles, remained heavy and that Russian forces were attempting an encirclement.
But speaking on Ukrainian television, he also said that the number of daily clashes was diminishing. “We can say that the enemy forces are running out of steam.”
Most military experts expect Russia’s offensive in the east to be followed in the spring by a Ukrainian counter-offensive aided by a recent influx of military aid by the United States and other Western allies. Its precise objectives remains unknown, but Kyiv’s overall goal is to reclaim all of the land lost to Russia since Moscow seized the Crimean region in 2014.
Ukraine on Saturday pushed back against a report by United Nations investigators who said they had documented 25 cases of summary executions of Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian forces. The report also said it had documented 15 cases of summary executions by Russian forces.
A statement by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs thanked the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine for its report but said that it was “unacceptable” to hold Ukraine responsible given that it was the victim of aggression, said the United Nations should avoid equating the two countries.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report this past week that the already devastating humanitarian situation in the region had “dramatically deteriorated” as the fighting had worn on. The remaining civilian population spends most of its time in basements, with 80 percent of homes destroyed or damaged, and is dependent on aid, the report said.
Bakhmut has no centralized water, gas, heating or electricity, and only four medical workers are left in town, the report said, citing local officials. Efforts to provide humanitarian aid are increasingly perilous, the United Nations said. It noted that an airstrike in February struck a warehouse of a local nonprofit group in Chasiv Yar that had been used as a hub by groups including the United Nations to send relief supplies to nearby towns.
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Ukrainian General Says, but Fighting Remains Intense appeared first on New York Times.
