• Russian military shelled residential structures and infrastructural facilities in Bakhmut on Wednesday.
• Three civilians were killed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Russian attempts to seize the city “crazy”.
• The city’s pre-war population of 70,000 has decreased significantly since February.

Three civilians were killed in Bakhmut on Wednesday, as Russian military persisted in their months-long assault to occupy the strategically significant city in eastern Ukraine.

The Donetsk regional police claimed in a Telegram post on Thursday that the Russians shelled residential structures and infrastructural facilities. According to the report, eight localities in the Donetsk region were struck by a total of 15 Russian rounds, including Bakhmut.

Late on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Russian troops’ repeated attempts to seize Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine “crazy.”

“The fiercest battles are in Donetsk region: Bakhmut direction, Avdiivka,” he said in his nightly video address.

“The craziness of the Russian command is now most visible there: day after day for months, they drive people there to death, concentrate the maximum power of artillery strikes there,” said Zelensky.

“All our soldiers who hold positions in these directions in Donetsk region are simply heroes.”

In Bakhmut, which is located on a route that connects to the settlements of Kostiantynivka to the southwest and Kramatorsk and Sloviansk to the northwest, Russian forces have steadily achieved incremental gains.

The city’s pre-war population of 70,000 has decreased significantly since February, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russian forces, according to a Facebook post from the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Thursday, “are not pausing [their] offensive actions in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions.”

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