Russian advances in Bakhmut, Ukraine, could cause heavy casualties, British military officials say.

Russian forces have made progress in their campaign to seize the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, the center of the war's longest-running ground battle, but their assault will be difficult to sustain without heavy casualties, British military officials said on Saturday. 

 

 The British Ministry of Defense  said in its latest assessment that  the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group paramilitary units have occupied most of eastern Bakhmut and the river running through the city now marks the frontline battles. 

 

 The mining town is  in Donetsk Oblast, one of four Ukrainian regions  that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last year.The Russian military launched a campaign to take control of Bakhmut in August, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. 

 

 Ukrainian troops and supply lines remain vulnerable to "constant Russian attempts to outflank  defenders from the north and south" while Wagner Group forces attempt to close in on them in a pincer movement, the British ministry said.  However, the ministry added that this would be a "major challenge" for Wagner's troops, as Ukraine  destroyed key bridges across the river, while Ukrainian sniper fire from fortified buildings farther east to west had created a thin open strip of land down the middle Out of town. "Death zone".Russian military bloggers and other pro-Kremlin Telegram accounts said on Friday that Russian forces had entered a metal factory in northwest Bakhmut. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, also pointed to geotagged images showing Russian forces half a mile from the  heavily built and fortified AZOM factory. 

The Institute said in its Friday night assessment that Moscow's emphasis on capturing the facility, rather than opting for "further encirclement of western Bakhmut" to capture nearby villages, is likely to result in a fresh wave of Russian casualties would. Ukrainian ground forces  signaled their intention to retain Bakhmut on Saturday, announcing on Facebook that their senior officer, Colonel Oleksandr Syrski, is personally monitoring "the most important sectors of the front" in a bid to rob Moscow of its long-awaited battlefield victory. .

 

 “Our army is standing. It's our fortress. And what they are doing now, we can't even imagine how useful it will be for the country, for our army in the near future," Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, told Ukrainian state television. 

 

 quoted Syrski, he said the alleys and areas around Bakhmut were "littered with the bodies of Russians and Wagnerians." Elsewhere in Ukraine, repair work continued on Saturday after a massive Russian missile and drone strike two days earlier  killed six people and  hundreds of thousands had left others without heat or electricity.

 

 Ukraine's public grid operator said power problems persisted in four provinces after shelling, which saw 80 Russian missiles and a smaller number of exploding drones hit residential buildings and critical infrastructure across the country.

In a Facebook post, Ukrenergo said planned power outages in Kharkiv and Zhytomyr, as well as parts of  Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv oblasts, are still in place. The company added that the situation in Zhytomyr is particularly difficult as some customers are still without electricity. 

 

 The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that on Saturday Russia carried out 34 rocket attacks in different parts of the country. This includes the Kherson province in southern Ukraine, where three people were killed "who had just gone to the store to get groceries," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

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 Russian shelling between Friday morning and Saturday morning  killed at least five people and injured 19 in Kherson and Donetsk provinces, Ukrainian authorities said.

 

 Donetsk, where Bakhmut is located, has been the epicenter of  fighting in recent months, while Ukrainian-controlled parts of Kherson have come under daily shelling from Russian troops stationed across the Dnieper. 

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 Russian forces also carried out 12 airstrikes and two rocket attacks on the city of Zaporizhia, the capital of the southeastern Ukrainian province of the same name, according to the Ukrainian military on Saturday. The S-300 missile attack hit  civilian infrastructure, but no casualties were reported. 

 

 Norwegian Defense Minister Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov received his Norwegian counterpart in Kiev on Saturday. Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram announced Norway's decision to provide $7.5 billion over the next five years for arms and other aid to Ukraine. 

 

 According to a reading of the meeting published by Ukraine's Defense Ministry, Gram said the weapons Norway intends to send include rocket launchers and ammunition for NASAMS anti-aircraft systems.  Reznikov said  Ukrainian troops have successfully used some of the same weapons to shoot down  drones and missiles that Russia dropped on Ukraine on Thursday. 

 

 "We know with certainty that all 10 applications of the NASAMS system (...) means shooting down 10 Aggressor missiles, saving 10 buildings and infrastructure and hundreds of  lives,” he said.