RUSSIAN forces have escalated their attacks on Ukrainian positions around the wrecked city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian officials said today.

“Everything is completely destroyed. There is almost no life left,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday of the scene around Bakhmut and the nearby Donetsk province city of Soledar.

“The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes,” Mr Zelensky said. “This is what madness looks like.”

The Kremlin, whose invasion of its neighbour 10-and-a-half months ago has suffered numerous reversals, is hungry for any victories.

Russia annexed Donetsk and three other Ukrainian provinces in September, but its troops have struggled to advance.

After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson in November, the battle heated up around Bakhmut.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Donetsk region’s Kiev-appointed governor, described the Russian attacks on Soledar and Bakhmut as relentless today.

“The Russian army is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble using all kinds of weapons in their scorched-earth tactics,” Mr Kyrylenko said in televised remarks.

Wounded soldiers arrived around the clock for emergency treatment at a Ukrainian medical stabilisation centre located near the front line around Bakhmut.

Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-backed leader of the occupied areas of Donetsk, said that Russia’s forces were “very close” to taking over Soledar.

But the gains were coming “at a very high price,” Mr Pushilin told Russian state TV.

Control over the city would create “good prospects” for taking over Bakhmut, Mr Pushilin said, as well as for a further assault on Siversk, a town further north where Ukrainian fortifications “are also quite serious.”