Ukraine struggling to hold Bakhmut, military sources say
Daniel Boffey
On Saturday, Ukraine’s armed forces reported that Russia had turned its artillery fire on 40 settlements close to Bakhmut, the city in the eastern Donetsk region that has been at the heart of some of the most intense fighting in recent months.
Military sources said Ukrainian forces were now struggling to hold the city, after the Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the nearby city of Soledar last week.
“The Russians are destroying anything that can be used for cover,” said one source. “The Ukrainian forces don’t have enough artillery.”
The risk of Bakhmut being encircled was said to be growing, with Ukraine’s army facing shortages of artillery that could hold back the advancing Russian forces.
Elsewhere in Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional administration, said three civilians were killed, and at least two injured in a morning missile strike on the city of Kostyantynivka.
Meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian official, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defence council, said Russia was preparing a new wave of offensives to mark the anniversary of the 24 February invasion.
He claimed Russian troops had been “given the task” of going “beyond the borders of” the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
It’s coming up to 6pm in London – 8pm in Kyiv. We’re now closing this blog. Here’s a summary of the day’s events.
A Russian strike killed three people in a residential district of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka on Saturday, the regional governor said. Fourteen other people were wounded in the attack, which also damaged four apartment buildings and a hotel, Reuters reported.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said ahead of an EU-Ukraine summit next week that Ukraine had unconditional support from the bloc and needed to prevail against Russian attacks to defend European values. “We stand by Ukraine‘s side without any ifs and buts. Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, it is fighting for the respect of international law and for the principles of democracy and that is why Ukraine has to win this war,” she was quoted as saying.
A new barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the Ukrainian president’s office has said. Towns and villages in the east and in the south that were within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most, regional officials said. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson and two in the Kharkiv region, Associated Press quoted the officials as saying on Friday.
A day earlier, Russian-fired missiles and self-propelled drones were reported to have hit deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described the situation on the frontline as “extremely acute”, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is stepping up its offensive. “The occupiers are not just storming our positions – they are deliberately and methodically destroying these towns and villages around them,” the Ukrainian president said, reporting major battles for Vuhledar and Bakhmut. Local Ukrainian officials reported heavy shelling in the north, north-east and east.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new US ambassador to Moscow, early next week, the RIA news agency reported today.
Ukrainian troops were locked in “fierce” fighting with Russian forces for control of Vuhledar, a townsouth-west of Donetsk, on Friday. Both sides claimed success in the small administrative centre, a short distance from the strategic prize of the village of Pavlivka, Agence France-Presse reported. The Donetsk region’s Moscow-appointed leader, Denis Pushilin, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying Vuhledar may soon become a “very important success for us”, while Kyiv said the town remained contested.
Ukraine’s army claims to have killed 109 Russian soldiers and wounded another 188 in one day during fighting around Vuhledar. Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson in the Ukrainian armed forces, said the death toll was recorded on Thursday, adding that “fierce fighting is ongoing”.
A total of 321 heavy tanks have been promised to Ukraine by several countries, Ukraine’s ambassador to France said on Friday. Vadym Omelchenko told French TV station BFM that “delivery terms vary for each case and we need this help as soon as possible”, while not specifying the number of tanks per country.
Belgium announced an additional €94m ($102m/£82.5m) package in military aid for Ukraine in what the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said was – including previous spending – the largest of its kind Belgium had ever given another country.
Ukraine said it is setting up drone assault companies within its armed forces that will be equipped with Starlink satellite communications, as it presses ahead with an idea to build up an “army of drones”, Reuters reported. The army’s commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, signed off on the creation of the units in a project that would involve several ministries and agencies, the general staff said.
Ten regions of Ukraine are instituting emergency power outages due to a power shortage in the network after Thursday’s Russian attacks, Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported. Repairs to damaged facilities are continuing.
The European Union wants swift accountability for “horrific” crimes in Ukraine, EU justice ministers have said while meeting in Stockholm. But the member states differ over how to bring prosecutions, seek evidence or fund war damage repairs.
The German arms-maker Rheinmetall is ready to greatly boost the output of tank and artillery munitions to satisfy strong demand in Ukraine and the West, Reuters reports.
And the news agency quoted the firm’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, as saying it may start producing Himars multiple rocket launchers in Germany.
He spoke days before Germany’s defence industry bosses are due to meet new defence minister Boris Pistorius for the first time, though the exact date has yet to be announced.
With the meeting, Pistorius aims to kick off talks on how to speed up weapons procurement and boost ammunitions supplies in the long term after almost a year of arms donations to Ukraine has depleted the German military’s stocks.
Rheinmetall makes a range of defence products but is probably most famous for manufacturing the 120mm gun of the Leopard 2 tank. Papperger said in an interview with Reuters:
We can produce 240,000 rounds of tank ammunition (120mm) per year, which is more than the entire world needs.
The capacity for the production of 155mm artillery rounds can be ramped up to 450,000 to 500,000 per year, he added, which would make Rheinmetall the biggest producer for both kinds of ammunition.
Anatolii, a local resident, walks inside his apartment destroyed by a Russian missile strike in Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region. Photograph: Reuters
Kyiv and its western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks on the possibility of equipping the invaded country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, the Associated Press quotes a top aide to Ukraine’s president as saying.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the west “understand how the war is developing” and the need to supply planes capable of providing cover for the armoured fighting vehicles that the US and Germany pledged at the beginning of the month.
However, in remarks to online video channel Freedom, Podolyak said some of Ukraine’s western partners maintain a “conservative” attitude to arms deliveries.
Ukraine struggling to hold Bakhmut, military sources say
Daniel Boffey
On Saturday, Ukraine’s armed forces reported that Russia had turned its artillery fire on 40 settlements close to Bakhmut, the city in the eastern Donetsk region that has been at the heart of some of the most intense fighting in recent months.
Military sources said Ukrainian forces were now struggling to hold the city, after the Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the nearby city of Soledar last week.
“The Russians are destroying anything that can be used for cover,” said one source. “The Ukrainian forces don’t have enough artillery.”
The risk of Bakhmut being encircled was said to be growing, with Ukraine’s army facing shortages of artillery that could hold back the advancing Russian forces.
Elsewhere in Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional administration, said three civilians were killed, and at least two injured in a morning missile strike on the city of Kostyantynivka.
Meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian official, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defence council, said Russia was preparing a new wave of offensives to mark the anniversary of the 24 February invasion.
He claimed Russian troops had been “given the task” of going “beyond the borders of” the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Russia’s defence ministry has Ukrainian forces of striking a hospital in the eastern Lugansk region, leaving 14 dead and injuring 24 others.
On Saturday morning in the town of Novoaidar, “the Ukrainian armed forces deliberately attacked the building of a district hospital” with a US-made HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system, the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry added that 14 were killed and 24 wounded among the “hospital patients and medical staff”, AFP reports.
The ministry added:
A deliberate missile strike on a known active civilian medical facility is, without doubt, a grave war crime by the Kyiv regime.
Russian strike kills three people in Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka
A Russian strike killed three people in a residential district of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka on Saturday, the regional governor said.
Fourteen other people were wounded in the attack, which also damaged four apartment buildings and a hotel, Reuters reported.
Donetsk’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Telegram:
Rescuers and law enforcement officials are working at the scene of the tragedy to help people and carefully document yet another crime by the Russian occupiers on our land.
Factory worker Iryna Maltseva, 42, said she was watching television when the explosion violently rattled her living room.
I opened my eyes and everything was blown out. I was covered in blood. Mom was sitting in the bedroom, also covered in blood.
Earlier today, Kyrylenko said at least four people had been killed and seven wounded throughout the region from Russian strikes over the past 24 hours.
Natalia Samsonova says she imagines the muffled screams of those trapped under the rubble, the fire and smell of smoke, the grief of the mother who lost her husband and infant child beneath the ruins of the building in Dnipro bombed by Russia. She imagines being unable to breathe.
That is why she is here, at a statue to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, a largely unknown monument tucked away among Moscow’s brutalist apartment blocks that has hosted a furtive anti-war memorial at a time when few in Russia dare protest against the conflict.
“I don’t know what else I can do … I wanted to show that not everyone is indifferent [to the war] and that some people still have a conscience,” she says, her eyes filling with tears.
It is the second time she has returned to place flowers at a makeshift memorial to victims of the strike on 14 January that killed 46 people and wounded more than 80. She passes it when she comes to visit her mother, who lives nearby.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has tweeted his support for Israel after seven people were killed leaving a synagogue in East Jerusalem on Friday evening.
He said:
Sincere condolences to the victims’ families.
The crimes were cynically committed on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Terror must have no place in today’s world. Neither in Israel or Ukraine.
We share 🇮🇱 pain after the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Among the victims is a 🇺🇦 woman. Sincere condolences to the victims' families. The crimes were cynically committed on the Intl Holocaust Remembrance Day. Terror must have no place in today's world. Neither in 🇮🇱 nor in 🇺🇦
More than 6,500 Russian military personnel have sought to surrender through a special “I want to live” hotline, Ukraine’s government has claimed, with the call centre said to have been recently moved to a secret location to avoid Moscow interference.
Vitaly Matvienko, a spokesperson at the department for prisoners of war, said those who had made contact through the service had been verified as serving in the Russian forces using their personal data and service number.
Between 15 September – when the hotline launched – and 20 January, it is claimed that 6,543 Russian personnel contacted the Ukrainian government to surrender into its custody, often from the frontline. The claims could not be independently verified.
'Do I have to get on my knees?': Russian soldier calls Ukrainian surrender hotline – audio
These are some of the latest images to be sent to us over the newswires from Ukraine.
A man walks past damaged buildings in Mariupol. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock
A Ukrainian serviceman gets ready to fire a mortar from a position not far from Bakhmut, Donetsk region. Photograph: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images
A woman walks through a residential neighbourhood after a Russian attack on Kostiantynivka. Photograph: Andriy Dubchak/AP
Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, says EU Commission president
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said ahead of an EU-Ukraine summit next week that Ukraine had unconditional support from the bloc and needed to prevail against Russian attacks to defend European values.
Reuters reported Von der Leyen said in a speech on Saturday at an event of her party, the Christian Democrat CDU, in Duesseldorf, Germany:
We stand by Ukraine‘s side without any ifs and buts. Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, it is fighting for the respect of international law and for the principles of democracy and that is why Ukraine has to win this war.
Von der Leyen and her fellow EU commissioners plan an EU-Ukraine summit on 3 February.
