(AP) — Despite Russian claims to have captured the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, top military leaders in Ukraine insist the grinding nine-month battle there is not over.
Although Ukraine now controls only a small part of the city, Kyiv says its troops played a key role in the strategy of exhausting Russian forces and will carry on fighting. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have died.
Satellite imagery shows infrastructure, apartment blocks and buildings reduced to rubble from artillery attacks.
A Russian state TV report from the smoldering city showed Russian fighters yelling “Victory!” and placing two flags — the Russian tricolor and the black flag of the private military contractor Wagner — atop a tall, partly destroyed building.
The flags were mounted “so that everyone could see them,” the correspondent said, even though the bombed-out, deserted 400-year-old city looks like a ghost of itself after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.