Russian advance stalls in Bakhmut, analysts say

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of Warfare said there were no confirmed advances by Russian forces on Bakhmut. Russian troops and units of the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-controlled military company, continued to launch ground attacks on the city but there was no evidence that they succeeded in gaining ground, the ISW said on Saturday.

The report quoted spokesman for the Eastern Group of Ukrainian Armed Forces, Serhii Cherevaty, as saying that fighting in the Bakhmut region had been more intense this week than the previous one. Cherevaty said there were 23 crashes in the city in the past 24 hours.

Allegations of Russian progress in the region had been reported last week. Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday paramilitary units from the Wagner Group had taken most of eastern Bakhmuth, with the river that runs through the town now marking the front line. The report pointed out that Russia would find it difficult to continue the attack without suffering further heavy casualties.

The mining town of Bakhmut is located in the eastern province of Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year. The Russian army began the campaign for Bakhmut in August, and both sides suffered heavy casualties. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed not to resign.

In its latest report released on Sunday, the British Ministry of Defense said the impact of the heavy casualties Russia continues to suffer in Ukraine varies widely from one part of the country to another. The ministry update noted that the major cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg remain “relatively unscathed”, especially among members of Russia’s elite. By contrast, in many parts of eastern Russia, the death rate as a percentage of the population is “30, 40 times higher than in Moscow.”

The report notes that ethnic minorities are often the most affected. In the southern region of Astrakhan, for example, about “75% of the victims come from the Kazakh and Tatar minority populations”.

The increase in the number of Russian casualties translates into a loss of government control over media coverage of the country, the ISW noted. The think tank said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had confirmed “divisions within the Kremlin’s inner circle” and that the Kremlin had effectively ceded control of the Kremlin’s information space. country, which Putin had not been able to recover quickly.

The ISW called Zakharova’s comments, at a forum in Moscow on “the practical and technological aspects of information and cognitive warfare in modern realities”, “remarkable” and in line with the previous estimate. of the think tank. dynamics of control of the information space”.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian strikes left at least five people dead and seven injured the day before in the Donetsk and Kherson regions, local Ukrainian authorities reported on Sunday morning.

Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said two people were killed in the area, one in the town of Kostyantynivka and the other in the town of Tonenke. Four other civilians were injured.

Russian forces fired 29 rounds on Saturday into Ukrainian-held territory in the southern Kherson region, according to local officials. Three times the fire was directed at residential areas in the regional capital, Kherson. Three people died in the province and three others were injured.

In the northeastern province of Kharkiv, the districts of Kharkiv, Chuhuiv and Kupiansk were targeted by fire, although no civilian casualties were reported.

The town of Ochakiv, at the mouth of the Dnieper River, came under artillery fire early Sunday morning, governor of Mykolaiv province in southern Ukraine Vitali Kim said. Several cars caught fire and skyscrapers and private homes were damaged. No casualties were reported.