2023-05-13 16:12:43
Kyiv claims to be “advancing” around Bakhmout, which for several months has become the epicenter of the fighting. Moscow, for its part, claims to be making progress in the city.
The Ukrainian army said on Saturday “to advance” around Bakhmout, the epicenter of fighting with Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, while Moscow assured to continue its progress in the city already mostly under its control and today largely devastated.
“The defensive operation in the direction of Bakhmout continues. Our soldiers are advancing in some areas of the front, and the enemy is losing equipment and troops”said on Telegram the commander of the ground troops of Ukraine, Oleksandre Syrsky.
The day before, Ukraine had said it had advanced two kilometers around Bakhmout, which Moscow had denied.
On Saturday, the Russian Ministry of Defense for its part did not comment on the Ukrainian assertions, indicating however in a press release that “assault units liberated a neighborhood in the northwestern part of the city of Artyomovsk”the Russian name for Bakhmout.
The battle for Bakhmout is the bloodiest and longest since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
Observers doubt the strategic scope of the conquest of this city for Russia but it would allow Moscow to post a victory after several humiliating setbacks.
For its part, Kyiv assumes that it wants to tire the Russian army as much as possible by fixing it in this area of Donbass before launching an offensive aimed at reconquering the occupied territories in the east and south of the country, whose preparations “are coming to an end” according to Ukrainian officials.
Moscow also accused Kyiv on Saturday of using British long-range Storm Shadow missiles the day before to target “civilian targets” in the Lugansk region (east) under Russian control.
Two dead and 10 wounded in a Russian strike near Bakhmout
At least two people were killed on Saturday and 10 others injured, including children, in a Russian strike in Kostiantynivka, a town 25 km southwest of Bakhmout, on the eastern front in Ukraine, prosecutors said.
“As a result of the shelling on Kostiantynivka, two people died and ten people were injured”dont “two teenagers aged 15 and 16”the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said in a statement posted on Telegram.
“They were taken to the hospital”he continued.
Kostiantynivka, a city of 70,000 inhabitants before the war, is located near the front line in the Ukrainian Donbass (east), an area advertised as the objective of conquest by Moscow.
The city is regularly bombarded by the Russian army.
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