- Before and after images show the devastation in Ukraine’s city of Bakhmut.
- The 10-month battle for the eastern city has been the longest and deadliest in the war in Ukraine.
- Bakhmut was once flush with greenery. Now it’s a gray city littered with skeletal buildings and brown earth.
The Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has been all but completely destroyed. Homes, schools, and businesses have been blown out by months of ceaseless combat and reduced to rubble, and most of the city’s people are long gone. What remains is a scarred landscape where thousands of lives have ended.
New satellite images from Maxar highlight the scale of the destruction caused by the battle for Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
The horrific fight that began last summer is the longest and bloodiest battle in the war in Ukraine. The battle has seen some of the hardest and most intense fighting and tremendous losses, and it’s not over. Neither side is backing away.
The Russian military and Wagner mercenaries began their siege of the city last August, though it faced regular shelling before that, and have been fighting to take control of the city for ten months. The Ukrainian army put up a fierce resistance, but it’s unclear if they can hold out against the Russian assault.
The city’s fate is uncertain, coming down to which side can outlast the other, but the following images capture how a thriving town of roughly 73,000 people became a war-torn, bloodstained battlefield.
