Nearby, heavy shelling also set alight several houses.

Rescue workers and the Ukrainian army have cancelled vehicle rescue missions into Bakhmut — because they have become too dangerous. Instead they have told civilians that they have to flee by foot.

“The Russians are shelling everything — they have no goal to save the city. Their only goal is killing people and the genocide of the Ukrainian people,” said Oleksandr Marchenko, deputy mayor of Bakhmut.

He believes the Kremlin is replaying the same scorched-earth tactics that it deployed at the start of the war.

“They want to destroy Bakhmut like they did with Mariupol,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.

Following a costly seven-month siege, Moscow’s forces now expect to capture the city in the coming days.

Western intelligence reports have said that Russian forces now surround Bakhmut, and Ukrainian soldiers may have been forced into a tactical retreat.

The UK ministry of defence said that the remaining Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut were enclosed on three sides, and Russian artillery had destroyed several key bridges out of the city. “Ukrainian resupply routes out of the town are increasingly limited.”

So far Ukraine is still holding on.

“There is fighting near the city, and there are also street fights,” Mr Marchenko added.

Footage from Bakhmut show something close to a dystopian hellscape. All the trees in the surrounding countryside are scorched and lifeless. The grass has been turned into mud. In the city, almost every building has been destroyed. The smashed shop signs are reminders of times before war ripped apart the city where 70,000 people had once lived.

Thousands of soldiers, on both sides, have died in the battle for Bakhmut. Ukraine’s military has reported that the Russian army treated its soldiers as cannon fodder, sending thousands of conscripts into their machine gun fire.

Some 4,000 people remain in the city, according to Ukrainian officials. They are either too poor, too old, too stubborn, or too bewildered to evacuate the ruins.

And they exist in a twilight zone of explosions, hunger, cold and death.

Hennadiy Mazepa and his wife Natalia Ishkova both chose to remain even though there is little food left.

“Humanitarian aid is given to us only once a month. There is no electricity, no water, no gas,” Ms Ishkova said. “I pray to God that all who remain here will survive.”

The precarious existence for those still in the city is reflected in the names for the Ukrainian missions into the city that had been running until recently.

White Angels searched Bakhmut for any civilians who wanted rescuing. They often brought food and sleeping bags with them to drop off. Dark Angels was the name for the missions that retrieved the dead bodies.

Analysts say the fight for Bakhmut may become one of the defining battles of the war in Ukraine — not because the victor will emerge with any strategic advantage, but because it has become a symbol.

Elsewhere, the death toll from a Russian missile strike that hit an apartment block in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia rose to 11 yesterday, after another woman’s body was found in the debris. 

One child was among those killed in Russia’s early-morning strike on the five-storey residential building last Thursday.

Officials from the regional administration said in another post that a Russian S-300 missile had hit the building.

In a post on Telegram shortly after the strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy promised to hold Russia accountable.

“The terrorist state wants to turn every day for our people into a day of terror. But evil will not reign in our land. We will drive all the occupiers out and they will definitely be held accountable for everything.”

Earlier Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu paid a rare visit to Russian forces in Ukraine, awarding medals to military personnel and meeting senior commanders during the trip.

Russia’s top military chiefs have visited front lines in Ukraine only sparingly since Moscow attacked its neighbour just over a year ago.

Shoigu inspected a “forward command post in the South Donetsk direction” according to a Russian statement published on messaging app Telegram.

In a video released by the ministry, Shoigu is seen giving medals to Russian military personnel and touring a ruined town alongside the district’s Russian commander.

In a second video, Shoigu is seen chairing a meeting with senior commanders, including Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov and General Sergei Surovikin, one of Gerasimov’s deputies.

Shoigu, who has been Russia’s defence minister since 2012, has come under harsh criticism over his performance in the conflict from pro-war advocates.

Last month, Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose force has played a significant role in Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, accused Shoigu and others of “treason” for withholding supplies of ammunition to his militia.

Meanwhile relatives, neighbours and friends of eight men executed by Russian forces during the occupation of the Ukrainian town of Bucha gathered Saturday to mark the first anniversary of the deaths.

The eight had set up a roadblock in an attempt to prevent Russian troops from advancing as they swept toward Kyiv at the start of the invasion. But the men were captured and executed.

Their bodies lay outside a building for a month, with relatives only able to collect them in April after Russian troops retreated from Bucha.

After the Russians left, Ukrainian authorities found mass graves and bodies strewn in the town’s streets, buildings and homes. The events are being investigated as war crimes.

“My heart is torn apart and my soul is in such pain for everyone who died here,” said Oleksandr Turovskyi, whose 35-year-old son, Sviatoslav, was among the eight.

Photos of the men now hang on the wall of the building where they were found, between two blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. A wreath of plastic roses and bouquets of blue and yellow flowers lean against the wall beneath the pictures.

As relatives gathered for the anniversary commemoration, Halyna Stakhova (67) tenderly touched the photo of Sviatoslav Turovskyi, her son-in-law. Her lip trembled and she wiped away a tear.

She lived in a basement in Bucha during the occupation, she said, and relatives told her Svietoslav had been executed.

At first, she refused to believe them — but she eventually had to accept that her daughter’s husband was dead.

“We were trying to get the body back,” she said. “But the Russians said: ‘Do you want to end up lying beside him? Ok, let’s go.’ So we waited for one month to collect the body.”

At the age of 81, Anna Levchenko braved the icy wind to attend the ceremony. Great-aunt to one of the executed men, she said he considered her his grandmother.

“One year has passed, but I still have all these images in my head,” she said.

“My father told me that after World War II there would be no more war for another 300 years. But look at what happened. Nobody was expecting this.”

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