Russian forces are depleted in Bakhmut and a Ukrainian counteroffensive could soon be launched, one of Kyiv’s top generals has said, raising the prospect of an unlikely turnaround in the besieged city.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s land forces, said on his Telegram channel Thursday that “[Russians] are losing significant forces [in Bakhmut] and are running out of energy.”
“Very soon, we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we did in the past near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balakliya and Kupyansk,” he said.
His comments come days after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made a surprise trip to the front lines of the Donetsk region, and will raise hopes in the West that Kyiv’s contentious decision to keep troops in Bakhmut will pay dividends.
A counteroffensive has seemed an unlikely prospect for several weeks, as forces from Russia’s Wagner mercenary group bombarded Bakhmut and edged closer toward seizing control of the city.
But that effort has come at a considerable cost to manpower and resources, and now appears to have slowed.
Russian troops have launched more than 200 strikes on the area in the past 24 hours alone but are losing hundreds of men each day in their efforts, the spokesman for the Eastern Grouping of the Armed Forces, Serhii Cherevatyi, said later on Thursday. CNN is unable to verify those figures.
Cherevatyi said another area that was seeing intense fire was to the northeast of Bakhmut, on the front line running north from the town of Kreminna.
Speaking on Ukrainian television Friday, Cherevatyi said that “It is not that [Wagner] are withdrawing, but that due to heavy losses they have to be reinforced by units of the regular army of the Russian Federation, primarily by airborne troops.”
He added that Russian forces in the area are “making several dozen attacks every day. There were 32 firefights over the last day,” in and around Bakhmut. There were also air strikes launched by both fixed-wing planes and attack helicopters, he said, but added that “artillery is a much bigger factor of influence on military operations there than aviation.”
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