The Ukrainian military said its forces repelled 49 attacks by invading Russian forces over the past day in the east as intense fighting continued in and around the besieged city of Bakhmut.
“The enemy isn’t giving up on his plans to occupy our territory despite significant losses,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in its daily update on April 14. “The fiercest battles continue for Bakhmut and Maryinka,” it added.
“Russia has re-energized its assault” on Bakhmut, the British Defense Ministry said in its intelligence update on April 14, adding that Russian military forces and Wagner mercenaries “have improved cooperation.”
“The Ukrainian defense still holds the western districts of the town but has been subjected to particularly intense Russian artillery fire over the previous 48 hours,” the British Defense Ministry said.
Ukraine Pounds Russian Positions Near Bakhmut As Moscow’s Forces Gain Ground
As the Kremlin’s “unrelenting” focus on capturing the ruined eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut grinds on at any cost, a Ukrainian artillery unit vows to punish their progress.
On April 13, Moscow claimed to have cut off Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, but the head of the Kremlin-linked Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said it remains “too early” to say the city has been surrounded.
Serhiy Chervatiy, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Group of Forces, told the AFP news agency that the Ukrainian military still had communication with troops in Bakhmut and were able to resupply them with ammunition.
“This does not correspond to reality,” Chervatiy said in response to the Russian claims.
Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensives, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war, click here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, has ordered his military to gain complete control of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson, areas he claims Russia has illegally annexed. Ukraine has indicated it will soon launch a counteroffensive to take back more territory.
Ukraine will “test and use” any non-banned weapons to liberate its territory, including Russian-occupied Crimea, the head of its National Security and Defense Council said on April 14.
“Crimea is the territory of Ukraine, and we will test and use there any weapons not prohibited by international laws that will help liberate our territories,” Oleksiy Danilov tweeted.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on April 13 that Kyiv would not back down from its demand that Russian invading forces withdraw from those four areas as well as from Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
“We are united by UN charter principles and the shared conviction that Crimea is Ukraine and it will return under Ukraine’s control,” Kuleba said, speaking by video link to a gathering in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
“Every time you hear anyone from any corner of the world saying that Crimea is somehow special and should not be returned to Ukraine, as any other part of our territory, you have to know one thing: Ukraine categorically disagrees with these statements,” he said at the Black Sea Security Conference.
Kuleba also urged NATO to accept his country and Georgia, also a Black Sea littoral state, as members.
He said the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius should present “a clear plan on when and how Ukraine will enter.”
Speaking to the same gathering, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said NATO membership for Ukraine was needed to safeguard not only his country’s security but that of the entire Black Sea region as well.
“We need a system of guarantees that would make aggression from Russia impossible,” said Reznikov, who attended the conference in the Romanian capital.
