Ukrainian defenders repelled more waves of Russian assaults on Bakhmut, the military said on March 29, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Kyiv cannot afford to lose the battle for the city in the Donetsk region that has become the focal point of Russia’s protracted offensive in the east.
“The enemy continued its assault on the city of Bakhmut,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in its daily report. “However, our defenders have been courageously holding on to the city, repelling numerous enemy attacks,” it said.
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Bakhmut, along with Avdiyivka, Mariynka, and Lyman, remain the main targets of Russia’s relentless shelling, the Ukrainian military said, adding that a total of 57 enemy attacks were repelled over the past 24 hours in the area.
Russian troops also carried out 18 air strikes and three missile strikes, as well as 50 rocket salvoes along the whole front line over the previous day, the military said.
The information could not be independently verified.
Farther south, Russian forces kept shelling the Kherson region, the head of the regional military administration Oleksandr Prokudin said.
“Over the past day, the enemy has shelled the region 34 times — three times the city of Kherson itself,” Prokudin said on Telegram, adding that one person was wounded.
Residential buildings, a hospital, and a factory were among the Russian targets, Prokudin said.
In the eastern Kharkiv region, one man was killed and another was wounded by massive Russian shelling, local police reported.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, visited the Russian-held Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant on March 29, Ukraine’s state-owned company Enerhoatom reported.
The visit was Grossi’s second to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant since the start of its occupation by Russian troops, Enerhoatom’s press service said.
The visit was part of efforts to avert the risk of an accident at the nuclear plant. On March 27, Grossi met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a working trip to the Zaporizhzhya region.
Meanwhile, Zelenskiy reaffirmed that Ukraine must hold on to Bakhmut at all costs, warning that a win by Russia there would be used by President Vladimir Putin as a stepping stone in garnering international support for a peace agreement that would force Ukraine to accept painful compromises.
Putin would “sell this victory to the West, to his society, to China, to Iran,” Zelenskiy told the Associated Press in an interview published on March 29.
“If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelenskiy said.
Ukrainian military commanders have said their own counteroffensive is not far off but in the meantime they seek to maintain control of Bakhmut.
The Ukrainian military announced on March 28 that it has recently received long-promised Western equipment, including German Leopard 2 tanks.
On March 28, Zelenskiy said in his evening video address that the world must act with more urgency to put a stop to Russia’s aggression.
He said he believed the “Russian aggression can end much faster” than some have said. It will end faster “if the world is faster, if the world is more decisive,” Zelenskiy said.
