Russian forces are advancing on Bakhmut, threatening to take away some of the glory weeks of Ukraine’s victories as life grows more desperate for the eastern city’s beleaguered residents.

On Friday, Rimma Zykalenko was determined to head over to the west bank of the Bakhmutka River to collect her monthly pension, despite being in a wheelchair and the bridge blown up to slow the Russian offensive.

“She won’t make it!” shouted Oleksandr Valiy, a 67-year-old retired factory worker, who stopped his bike to watch as the disabled 65-year-old’s neighbors abused her as she walked down a steep bank to the riverbank.

“We’ve done it before!” snapped one of the group as they laboriously led them back home across the makeshift wooden walkway that replaced the city’s mangled concrete road bridge in the Donetsk region.

The pensioner survived the walk and her wheelchair was carried after her, but her life was not out of danger. Smoke rose in columns from shell bursts south of the city, and machine gun fire could be heard on the east bank.

Even on the relatively safer west side, several apartment blocks have been blown up, debris and broken glass line the streets, and falling shells whistle eerily overhead, sending passers-by to duck.

While civilians struggled to transport water and basic necessities across the destroyed bridge, the Russian-led proxy Donetsk region force claimed to have taken four villages south of the city.

Intense shelling was heard from the direction of Otradovka, Veselaya Dolina and Zaitsevo, now apparently in the hands of forces loyal to the now Russian-annexed separatist Donetsk Republic.

Bakhmut — a wine and salt-mining town on the main Donetsk-Kyiv road that was once home to 70,000 people — would be a big asset if Moscow has any hopes of securing the region.

Moscow’s forces launched a push towards Bakhmut in August, and two weeks later the Ukrainian general staff admitted that the invading force had had “some success” without taking the city.

Since then, the portrayal of the war in the east has changed, with headlines dominated by successful Ukrainian counter-offensives in the north, in the Kharkiv region and in the south on the approaches to Kherson.

But not in Bakhmut, where Russia seems to have the momentum.

In the city, Ukrainian forces are still in command and holding their own, but there are persistent reports that Russian troops, including mercenaries from the Wagner Company, have infiltrated the east bank.

“My home district of Zabakhmutka is over there and I haven’t been able to reach my house for about two months,” said 29-year-old humanitarian volunteer Edvard Skoryk, gesturing across the river.

“This part of the city was hit hard, the eastern part. There are street fights every night, I know that 100 percent,” he told AFP.

At the bridge, Skoryk distributed a few loaves of bread to civilians crossing the river, some of them pushing bicycles or lugging 20-litre water cooler refills on flimsy carts.

But he had another mission, he worked for the Ukrainian humanitarian group Vostok SOS, evacuating vulnerable residents from shell-damaged apartments to get them out of Bakhmut before the fighting intensified.

He jumped into a white van and drove off. Many of Bakhmut’s main streets are blocked with steel anti-tank barriers and concrete slabs reinforced with piles of brick rubble, forcing him to weave the van through courtyards and back alleys at high speed.

“Genya, I’m already in Bakhmut,” he called into his cell phone. “If you can go now, I can pick you up.”

In a nine-story concrete block of flats, part of a residential neighborhood near the city center, he climbed the stairs to an upstairs apartment and found an old man and his dog who had to be evacuated from the city.

Ivan Solovyankov is 90 and couldn’t leave Bakhmut because of the bombing. Skoryk drove him out of town towards the city of Dnipro, from where he can catch a train to the relatively safe Kharkiv.

The residents of Bakhmut who remain behind are attempting to amass meager supplies of food and water for the forthcoming battle.

Igor Maksymenko’s water barrel leaks when it falls off its wire wagon while descending the rickety bridge, but he manages to fix it, determined to take it to the east bank to seal a block of flats that still houses 25 people accommodate.

“Sometimes they fire very close by, next to this store, right over our heads, and shrapnel mixed with dirt sprays everywhere,” he said. “But we carry it on anyway. how can we go away Where? Stay with who?