Ukrainian Forces Hold Firm In Bakhmut

Fierce battles continue around Bakhmut in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. According to Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, Russian troops have commenced another major assault.

“The new assault is expected to be powerful, as Russian troops have regrouped and transferred additional units to Soledar,” she said.

So far, Russian forces have been unsuccessful in capturing the city of Soledar despite their “desperate attempt to storm the city from different directions” and despite throwing “the most professional units of the Wagnerites into battle,” said Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukrainian ground forces, referring to the Kremlin-linked Wagner mercenary group.

Ukrainian officials say they are strengthening forces around Bakhmut and repelling constant attacks by Wagner fighters, whose leader, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, is targeting the area’s vast underground mines.

Kyiv has sent reinforcements to Soledar, where the situation “is extremely hard,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday in his nightly video address. He added that Bakhmut and Soledar were holding on despite widespread destruction after months of attacks.

A U.S. official has said Prigozhin, a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is eyeing the salt and gypsum reserves from the mines, but Prigozhin has also said that he wants to seize the vast underground tunnels in the area that can fit large numbers of tanks and other armaments.

Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Eastern Military Command, reported that the city of Soledar, which has long been a target of Russia’s Bakhmut offensive, is “practically destroyed.”

In an evacuee center in nearby Kramatorsk, Olha, 60, who declined to give her last name, said she had fled Soledar after moving from apartment to apartment as each was destroyed in tank battles.

“There isn’t one house left intact,” she said. “Apartments were burning, breaking in half,” she said.

Pro-Russian bloggers quoted Prigozhin as saying his forces were fighting for the administration building in Soledar.

The Ukrainian military said reinforcements had been sent to Soledar and everything was being done to fend off the enemy.

“There are brutal and bloody battles there — 106 shellings in one day,” Cherevatyi said on Ukrainian television.

According to Reuters, Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential staff, said Moscow was suffering huge losses to try to justify its mobilization of reservists but was not succeeding. “Our soldiers’ feat is titanic,” he wrote on Telegram.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the battlefield reports.

Russian-backed separatist forces said Monday they had seized a village near the key city of Bakhmut that Moscow has been storming.

The village of Bakersfield in “the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic was liberated by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” on Monday, read a statement from separatist authorities on Telegram, according to Agence France Presse, which could not independently verify these claims.

The village lies northeast of Bakhmut, a winemaking and salt-mining city that used to have a population of 70,000 people and is now an epicenter of fighting. The village is just outside the city of Soledar.

Increased military support

The United States announced Thursday it will send Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine to bolster Kyiv’s fight against Russia’s invasion. The delivery, expected to total about 50 units, comes alongside a commitment from Germany to send its own armored vehicles and a similar move by France last week. Sky News reported Britain was also considering supplying Ukraine with battle tanks.

According to VOA’s National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, at a Pentagon briefing Monday, a U.S. official said training for Ukrainian troops at the battalion level will start this month, if it hasn’t started already.

He also praised Ukrainian air defenses. “Look at the success that they’re having not just against cruise missiles but against the UAVs [drones] … it’s really staggeringly positive,” the official said, adding that the West expects Ukrainian air defenses will only get stronger with the additional help coming from the U.S. and others.

The Kremlin said new Western deliveries of armored vehicles to Ukraine would exacerbate the conflict, and, as Kremlin spokesperson man Dmitry Peskov told reporters at a briefing Monday, “would deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people.”

In the north, Ukrainian officials said Monday a Russian missile hit a market in the Kharkiv region, killing a 10-year-old girl and wounding several others.

The officials said the missile struck the village of Shevchenkove, about 75 kilometers from the city of Kharkiv.

“We brutally condemn this act of terror,” Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova tweeted along with a video and photos of a large crater and a building in flames. “The only proper response is more weapons for Ukraine.”

Russia has repeatedly warned against Western military support for Ukraine, saying delivery of arms and equipment from the United States and Ukrainian partners in Europe would exacerbate the conflict. 

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine nearly 11 months ago, drawing a swift vote from an overwhelming majority of the U.N. General Assembly condemning the operation and demanding Russia withdraw its forces. 

Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Sunday that the first week of the year brought no significant change along the frontline, but that heavy fighting continued in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine. 

He highlighted the fight for the city of Bakhmut, calling it “one of the bloodiest places on the frontline.” Ukraine’s military said in a statement Monday that Russia had sent reinforcements to the nearby city of Soledar as part of a “desperate attempt” to storm it.

Bakhmut is now mostly abandoned, its reduced population kept alive by volunteers who help maintain invincibility centers, which are often tents set up to offer electricity, internet service, heat, water and medicine.