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...
The U.K. Defense 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.
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.” Ukraine’s ground forces on Saturday signaled their intention to hold out in Bakhmut, announcing on Facebook that their top officer, Col. Oleksandr Syrskyi, was personally overseeing “the most important sectors of the front” to deny Moscow a long-awaited battlefield victory.
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. The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces reported that Russia launched 34 attacks from multiple rocket launchers Saturday on various parts of the country. They included southern Ukraine’s Kherson province, where three people “who simply went to a store to buy groceries” were killed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
On Saturday, Russian forces also launched 12 air strikes and two missile strikes on the city of Zaporizhzhia, the capital of the southeastern Ukrainian province of the same name, according to Ukraine’s military. A strike by an S-300 missile hit a civilian infrastructure facility, but no casualties were reported.
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