Russian forces are escalating their onslaught against Ukrainian positions around the wrecked city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian officials said, bringing new levels of death and devastation in the grinding, months-long battle for control of eastern Ukraine.

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

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

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

“The Russian army is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble using all kinds of weapons in their scorched-earth tactics,” Kyrylenko said in televised remarks. “Russia is waging a war without rules, resulting in civilian deaths and suffering.”

An exceptional feature of the fighting in the area is that some of it has taken place around entrances to disused salt mine tunnels which run for some 200 kilometres (120 miles) underneath the area, the UK ministry of defence noted Tuesday in its intelligence report.

“Both sides are likely concerned that (the tunnels) could be used for infiltration behind their lines,” it said.

Source: France 24