Fight for Roads Into Bakhmut Has Hit a Stalemate, Ukraine Says

The seesaw fight for a sunflower field raged for weeks with neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces gaining an upper hand, but for Ukraine’s army, that counts as a win in the crucial battle for access roads into the city of Bakhmut.

Inside the battered eastern Ukrainian city, the site of one of the longest-running battles of Russia’s war in Ukraine, urban combat is raging in pitched, block-by-block fights for control. Here, Russian forces have been slowly advancing.

But in farm fields and villages on Bakhmut’s outskirts, Ukrainian military officials say Kyiv’s forces have fought the Russian Army essentially to a standstill in the battle for two key roads, the T504 highway and a route known as the 506.

Six weeks after the start of a Ukrainian operation to reinforce supply lines outside Bakhmut and protect the roads, Ukrainian military officials say they have thwarted, at least for now, a Russian effort to sever those roads and surround the city.

To the southwest of Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces have fought hard to protect the T504 highway. Ukraine’s soldiers made a tactical retreat of a few hundred yards and now hold a commanding position in a trench overlooking the sunflower field. The field is one of dozens the Ukrainians must defend along the front to the south of the road.