Russian forces are escalating their onslaught against Ukrainian positions around the wrecked eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian officials said, bringing new levels of death and devastation to the grinding, months-long battle.

“Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left,” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said late Monday of the scene around Bakhmut and the nearby town of Soledar. “The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes,” he said. “This is what madness looks like.”

The deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said Russia has thrown “a large number of storm groups” into the battle. “The enemy is advancing literally on the bodies of their own soldiers and is massively using artillery, rocket launchers, and mortars, hitting their own troops,” she said.

Russian troops alongside soldiers from a Russian private military contractor, the Wagner Group, have advanced in recent days in Soledar and “are likely in control of most of the settlement,” the British ministry of defense tweeted Monday.

Russia’s steamrolling through Soledar will raise questions about whether some analysts in the West have been too quick to dismiss the weight of Moscow’s military footprint after months of Russian missteps. Writing in Foreign Affairs, a political science professor at MIT, Barry Posen, said that Russia’s battle maneuvers are “finally starting to make military sense.” 

With respect to the liberation of Kherson late last year, Mr. Posen wrote that despite the Russian withdrawal from that city, “the Russians pulled off one of the hardest military operations: retreating during a major attack without suffering the disintegration or annihilation of their forces.”

Yet Mr. Posen also said that while all developments on the ground now do not necessarily point to Ukraine’s favor, they do foretell a lengthy “war of attrition.” He wrote that casualties on both sides overall were “roughly comparable,” with Ukrainian casualties probably numbering closer to 50,000 and Russian losses in the   range of  50,000 to 100,000.

The Donetsk region’s Kyiv-appointed governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, on Tuesday described the Russian attacks on Soledar and Bakhmut as relentless.

“The Russian army is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble using all kinds of weapons in their scorched-earth tactics,” Mr. Kyrylenko said in televised remarks. “Russia is waging a war without rules, resulting in civilian deaths and suffering.”

The British defense ministry said that taking Soledar, six miles north of Bakhmut, is likely Moscow’s immediate military objective and part of a strategy to encircle Bakhmut. It added that “Ukrainian forces maintain stable defensive lines in depth and control over supply routes” in the area.

An exceptional feature of the fighting near Bakhmut is that some has taken place around entrances to disused salt mine tunnels that run for some 120 miles underneath the area, the British intelligence report noted.

“Both sides are likely concerned that [the tunnels] could be used for infiltration behind their lines,” it said.

Several front-line cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces have witnessed intense fighting in recent months. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, a broad industrial region bordering Russia that President Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.

Russia’s grinding eastern offensive captured almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk escaped the same fate, and the Russian military subsequently poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut.

After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson last November, the battle heated up around Bakhmut. Taking the town would disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk.

Like Mariupol and other contested cities, Bakhmut has endured a long siege, spending weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.

Mr. Kyrylenko estimated more than two months ago that 90 percent of Bakhmut’s pre-war population of over 70,000 had fled since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.