The battle for Bakhmut is getting so close that 'fistfights have been happening,' Ukrainian soldier says

• A Ukrainian soldier told the Washington Post the fighting in Bakhmut is brutal and at close quarters.
• The soldier said there have even been fistfights as they fight off waves of Russian mercenaries.

Fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been one of the primary battles in the war for months, has featured brutal, close quarters combat, according to a Ukrainian soldier.

In some cases, Ukrainian troops have searched house-to-house for the enemy and been forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat, Dmytro Vatagin, a 48-year-old Ukrainian soldier, told the Washington Post.

"Fistfights have been happening," Vatagin said. "Everyone has their own fighting story."

The infamous Wagner mercenary group has played a central role in the fight for Bakhmut. Vatagin told the Post that Wagner has thrown its forces — a mix of seasoned fighters and newly released convicts — "like meat" at the frontline in relentless waves that have exhausted Ukrainian defenders. Wagner has recruited Russian prisoners for the fight and treated them like "cannon fodder," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last month.

Similarly, UK officials have claimed that some Russian reservists in the attacks were told to fight with shovels.

The mercenary group has suffered roughly 30,000 casualties in the war, Kirby said.

Russia's extreme costs in assaulting Bakhmut, a city of roughly 70,000 before the war, are seen by most Western analysts as out of step with the strategic value of the gained territory, from which they could advance down two highways should they still have combat power.

"It is more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of Bakhmut in comments to reporters on Monday, per Reuters.

"The fall of Bakhmut won't necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight," Austin added.

The city is seemingly on the verge of falling to Russian forces, but Ukraine is not giving up without a fight and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday said that his top generals have called for reinforcing Bakhmut's defense. That said, top military experts have suggested that it might be time for Ukraine to cut its losses in Bakhmut.

"The tenacious defense of Bakhmut achieved a great deal, expending Russian manpower and ammunition. But strategies can reach points of diminishing returns," Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses, said on Twitter.

"This fight doesn't play to Ukraine's advantages as a force," Kofman said, warning that if Ukrainian forces continue to expend resources on Bakhmut "it could impede the success of a more important operation."