Ukrainian forces are locked in “especially hot” battles against Russian soldiers in the eastern town of Bakhmut, Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday.
The Ukrainian president gave no indication that his military was on the brink of retreating from the mining town where Russian units have suffered very heavy losses.
The head of Putin’s Wagner Group “private army”, claimed his troops, involved in a months-long effort to encircle and capture the bombed-out town, had raised a Russian flag on its administrative building.
“From a legal point of view, Bakhmut has been taken. The enemy is concentrated in the western parts,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in video posted on his press service’s Telegram account.
Prigozhin has previously made claims that were premature.
Russian forces have been gradually seizing more of Bakhmut but have suffered 30,000 casualties in some of the fiercest fighting of the war as they have tried over many months to seize the town, according to British military intelligence.
Ukraine’s defence chiefs said in a Monday update that Bakhmut and several other towns including Avdiivka were at the “epicentre of hostilities”.
“The enemy continues its assault on the city of Bakhmut. However, our defenders courageously hold the city,” they added.
Mr Zelensky, in his Sunday night video address, thanked soldiers fighting in Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Maryinka.
“Especially Bakhmut. It is especially hot there,” he said.
Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar had earlier described the Bakhmut situation as “tense”.
Ukrainian forces were defending their positions and Russian units were being thrown into battle with scant attention to losses as they attacked, he added.
Ukrainian military commanders have said their own counter-offensive, backed by newly delivered Western tanks and other heavy weapons, is not far off, but have stressed the importance of holding Bakhmut in the meantime.
Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said fighting had engulfed the centre of Bakhmut. Ukrainian forces had repelled 25 enemy attacks, but Russian forces had captured the AZOM metal plant.
Unconfirmed footage appeared to show a huge explosion at the plant, though there were doubts about it as there was no snow on the ground in the town recently hit by wintry weather.
“The enemy is attacking (Bakhmut’s) centre from the north, the east and the south and is trying to take (it) under its full control,” Mr Zhdanov, who has close ties to the Ukrainian military, said in a video on YouTube.
In Russia, a well-known military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by a bomb in a St Petersburg cafe on Sunday in what appeared to be the second assassination on Russian soil of a figure closely associated with the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s state Investigative Committee said it had opened a murder investigation into the blast, which wounded 32 people.
