Russia has stepped up its attacks around Bakhmut in Ukraine's eastern region of Donbas and particularly around the city of Soledar, few miles north of Bakhmut. According to Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, Russian troops have commenced another major assault.
Ukrainian forces repelled an earlier attempt to take the town, but a large number of Wagner units quickly returned, deploying fresh tactics and more soldiers under heavy artillery cover, Maliar said on Telegram.
"The enemy literally step over the corpses of their own soldiers, using massed artillery, MLRS systems and mortars," she added, explaining that the attackers were drawn from Wagner's best reserves.
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.
In his nightly video address Monday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the resilience of Ukraine's forces fighting off waves of attacks in Donbas had helped the country win time and gain strength.
"Thanks to the resilience of our soldiers in Soledar, we have won for Ukraine additional time and additional strength," he said.
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 in the area 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.
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. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday he was certain of the need to coordinate weapons deliveries to Ukraine with allies as pressure mounts on Berlin to send Kyiv its Leopard 2 battle tanks.
"Germany will not go alone," he said at an event of his center-left Social Democrat party (SPD) kicking off the campaign for the Berlin state election.
"Germany will always remain united with its friends and allies ... Anything else would be irresponsible in such a dangerous situation."
Germany has become one of Ukraine's top military supporters in response to Russia's invasion on Ukraine last February.
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.
According to VOA's Carla Babb, a Pentagon official called the fight in Bakhmut "really savage."
"And what I mean by savage is you're talking about thousands upon thousands of artillery rounds that have been delivered between both sides," he said, adding that Russian mercenary forces sacrifice their weaker soldiers by putting them in the front lines.
They "essentially take the brunt," he said, adding that better trained forces then "move behind them to claim the ground."
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."
Some material in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
