In recent weeks, the battle for Bakhmut has escalated to the point of leading Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to declare on December 10 that Russian shelling had turned the city into ruins. In the midst of the intense fighting surrounding the city, contradictory information has come out over the fate of Bakhmut—and whether it’s on the brink of falling into Russian hands.
Pro-Russian media claimed on Wednesday that Moscow’s troops had finally breached the eastern defensive lines of Bakhmut and were now “fighting street battles” in the industrial zone of the Ukrainian city.
The news, reported by pro-Russian news source Rybar on its official Telegram channel, wasn’t confirmed by any other source and couldn’t be independently verified by Newsweek.
The Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) confirmed in its latest update that Russian forces continued their offensive operations in the Bakhmut area on Wednesday, but it didn’t confirm or deny the claims made by Russian sources about the fighting shifting to the eastern outskirts of the city.
The think tank reported the several different—and sometimes contradictory—updates on the Russian offensives around Bakhmut coming from multiple Russian microbloggers. They claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults northeast of Bakhmut near Yakovlivka and Pidhorodne; that Russian forces had established control over positions on the outskirts of Soledar; that Wagner Group units and Ukrainian forces are fighting on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut; and that Russian forces conducted assaults south of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and continued to clear Opytne.
On the same day, the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults in several locations near Bakhmut.
Russia’s focus on the city of Bakhmut, some 50 miles north of the regional capital of Donetsk, has baffled both Ukrainian and Western officials, who have wondered at the reason why Moscow is concentrating its offensives on such an apparently small target.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the ISW wrote in an update released in late November.
The ISW believes that Russian forces are seeking to “complete the capture of the entirety of Donetsk Oblast,” and it estimates that “potential future offensives in the western Donetsk Oblast may be intended to complement ongoing offensive drives on the western outskirts of Donetsk City and around Bakhmut to accomplish this wider territorial objective.”
Despite recent territorial gains in the region, the ISW said that Russian troops are “highly unlikely” to be able to take “strategically-significant territory” in Ukraine in the coming months due to Russia’s still “degraded” combat capability.
Newsweek contacted Russia’s ministry of defense and Ukraine’s armed forces for comment.
