Russia fights to encircle Ukraine’s defenders in Bakhmut

Russian forces kept up their offensive in eastern Ukraine as they pressed to encircle the small mining city of Bakhmut, the scene of the toughest fighting in battlefields saturated by rain and an early spring thaw.
The battle line ran from Kupiansk, site of a regional railroad junction, through Bakhmut and south to the Russian-occupied city of Shakhtarsk in the Donetsk region, Ukraine’s military said early Tuesday.
“The number of enemy personnel is increasing,” Ukraine’s general staff said. Apart from Bakhmut itself, six nearby Donetsk settlements came under Russian shelling, it said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday described the situation around Bakhmut as increasingly difficult.