Russia said on Wednesday it had captured three villages near Bakhmut, a now mostly destroyed town in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces have been trying to capture since the summer, AFP reported.

“After offensive actions, the Russian military liberated the cities of Belogorivka and Ozaryanivka,” the Russian Ministry of Defense reported in the afternoon.

The first village is located approximately 25 km north of Bakhmut, and the second approximately twenty kilometers to the south.

Later on Wednesday, he announced the capture of a third settlement south of the city of Andriivka.

Russia also claimed to have captured another part of Donetsk region, the town of Vodiane, a little closer to Avdiivka, a town near the front line since 2014.

Since the summer, intense fighting has been going on for Bakhmut, which Moscow has unsuccessfully tried to capture, despite the support of the Wagner paramilitary group.

The battle took on even greater symbolic significance for Russian officials as the capture of the city followed a series of humiliating defeats, with retreats from Kharkov (northeast) in September and Kherson (south) in November.

The Russian military regularly announces the capture of very small towns near Bakhmut, but has never seemed to be able to capture the city, which Ukrainian authorities say still holds nearly half of its pre-war population of 70,000.

The city is now partially destroyed, mainly due to artillery shelling, and no longer has access to electricity and gas, the president of Ukraine said in a briefing on Wednesday morning.

The head of “Wagner”, billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin called the battle a “slaughter near Bakhmut”, promising to “destroy the Ukrainian army” there.

But Russian advances around this city are far from enough, according to the US think tank Institute for the Study of War, which analyzes daily events at the front.

The institute on Wednesday called Moscow’s progress “negligible” and said it was unlikely that Russian forces would be able to quickly encircle Bakhmut.