Thousands of civilians remaining in the region around the city of Bakhmut — the site of a long, grueling battle in eastern Ukraine — are living in abject conditions with scant access to basic necessities, according to international aid workers.
The fighting in and around Bakhmut has been the most violent of recent months and does not appear to be letting up, with Russian and Ukrainian officials expressing this past week an unwillingness to yield.
Ukrainian officials have said that the civilians are choosing to stay despite their best efforts to evacuate them, with some even hiding from police officers or emergency workers. But many of those who remain are older or disabled people with low mobility and family members caring for them, Umar Khan, an official with the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a briefing Friday.
“All you see are people pushed to the very limit of their existence and survival,” said Mr. Khan, who traveled with a Red Cross convoy that delivered aid to towns around Bakhmut this past week. “The sheer scale of destruction is shocking.”
In an indication of the continuing threat to civilians in the area, the head of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Saturday that Russian shelling over the past day had killed a civilian in the town of Horlivka, around 20 miles south of Bakhmut, and wounded a resident in Bakhmut.
For many Ukrainians, the determination to hold Bakhmut has become an imperative, in part because of the losses sustained by the city’s defenders. But there has also been increasing evidence in recent days that a Russian assault there, part of a wider offensive in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, may have peaked.
The Ukrainian military’s general staff said on Saturday morning that its forces had fought off 59 attempted Russian assaults over the past 24 hours along the eastern front line that includes Bakhmut and the town of Avdiivka, around 50 miles south. That number appeared to be trending down when compared with the number of clashes recorded in recent weeks.
Col. Oleksii Dmytrashkivskyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military, said that the fighting around Avdiivka, which has been shattered by months of fighting, remained heavy and that Russian forces were attempting an encirclement.
But speaking on Ukrainian television, he also said that the number of daily clashes was diminishing. “We can say that the enemy forces are running out of steam.”
A report from Britain’s defense intelligence agency on Saturday echoed the same sentiment.
“Russia’s assault on the Donbas town of Bakhmut has largely stalled,” the report said. “This is likely primarily a result of extreme attrition of the Russian force.” It added that Ukraine had sustained “heavy casualties.”
The Red Cross said on Friday that there were several thousand people living in Bakhmut and as many as 10,000 in nearby towns including Kostiantynivka and Chasiv Yar, where the group handed out basic goods this past week including hygiene kits, solar lamps and emergency drinking water.
A Ukrainian official said this past week that about 3,500 people, including 32 children, remained in the city of Bakhmut, in Donetsk Province. The prewar population was 70,000.
Last month, Ukraine barred aid groups from gaining access to the city, saying that conditions had become too dangerous as Russian troops closed in, a step some saw as a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal. Yet the costly battle has ground on, with both sides sustaining heavy losses while imbuing the battle with symbolic importance.
The battle for Bakhmut, which began in the summer, has become one of Russia’s longest-running assaults in the war. The fighting has intensified in recent months, with Russian troops nearly encircling the city in February.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited the Bakhmut area this past week for a second time to rally soldiers, appearing to signal that the country would not give in. Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private military group that has sent droves of enlisted convicts to the battle, said this past week that, “the Bakhmut meat grinder continues.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report this past week that the already dire humanitarian situation in the region had “dramatically deteriorated” as the fighting has intensified. The remaining civilian population spends most of its time in basements, with 80 percent of homes destroyed or damaged, and is dependent on aid, the report said.
Bakhmut has no centralized water, gas, heating or electricity, and only four medical workers are left in town, the report said, citing local officials. Efforts to provide humanitarian aid are increasingly perilous, the United Nations said. It noted that an airstrike in February struck a warehouse of a local nonprofit group in Chasiv Yar that had been used as a hub by groups including the United Nations to send relief supplies to nearby towns.
