“Fierce fighting” is taking place near the town of Khasiv Yar, a key town near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine that the Russian army is “actively trying to advance on,” the Ukrainian army said on Tuesday.
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A possible capture of this nearly deserted site could allow Russian forces to step up their attacks on Kramatorsk, the last Kiev-controlled major city in Donbass that is increasingly the target of Russian bombing raids.
“The enemy is actively trying to advance towards Hasiv Yar. Especially near Ivanivské and Bogdanivka, where there is heavy fighting on the outskirts of the city,” the army spokesman in the area, Illia Ievlach, said on television.
The Russian army “is sending reserves and trying to reinforce its troops with assault units,” he added.
The villages of Ivanivské and Bogdanivka lie on the edge of the front line, about just 3 km southeast and northeast of Chasiv Yar, where the Ukrainian army withdrew after the fall of the town of Bachmout, about ten kilometers to the east, in May 2023.
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Hasiv Iar, which has only a few hundred inhabitants (12,000 before the war), is regularly bombed by Russian forces and many buildings are destroyed.
The town is about 25 km from Kramatorsk, the administrative center of the Donetsk region, which is largely occupied by Russia.
After the loss of Bakhmut, at the end of one of the longest and bloodiest battles of that war, the Ukrainian army recaptured two locations on that city's southern flank as part of its summer counteroffensive.
But then the front froze and the Russian army resumed attacks in recent weeks to advance on the Eastern Front, taking advantage of the lack of ammunition and weapons suffered by Ukrainian soldiers.
After the Ukrainian army withdrew from its fortress town of Avdiivka around ten days ago, it confirmed its withdrawal from the three neighboring villages of Lastochkyné, Sieverné and Stepové further to the west on Monday and Tuesday.