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Russian forces have continued their aggressive offensive in eastern Ukraine, and have made small progress in capturing Ukrainian strongholds in the Donetsk region.
Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kirilenko wrote in a social media post on Saturday that intermittent Russian shelling near the city of Bakhmut damaged regional administrative buildings and injured residents.
The British Ministry of Defense posted its intelligence update the same day, saying that “Russian forces continue to invest a large element of their overall military effort and firepower” along a nearly 15-kilometer-long front line around Bakhmut.
The ministry also said that in recent days, “Russia has made small progress on the southern axis of this attack.”
“The campaign has been disproportionately expensive compared to these potential benefits,” he says.
The ministry added that “there is a real possibility that the capture of Bakhmut has become primarily a symbolic, political objective for Russia.”
The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, made a similar assessment that Russian efforts to advance on Bakhmut “have resulted in continued attrition of Russian manpower and equipment.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, tweeted on Saturday that Russia had lost thousands of its troops near Bakhmut, which had “no strategic significance.” He urged the Russians to forget about Bakhmut.
In the southern region of Kherson, Russian forces continued to fire artillery shells on the west side of the Dnipro River from where they withdrew last month.
The Kherson governor posted an assessment on social media that Russian forces launched artillery volleys 28 times on Friday, damaging infrastructure and medical facilities.
The governor added that officials were helping to evacuate residents on trains and buses.
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