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 in the grinding, months-long battle.

“Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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,” Zelenskyy said. “This is what madness looks like.”

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 the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor, have advanced in recent days in Soledar and “are likely in control of most of the settlement,” the U.K. Defense Ministry tweeted Monday.

It said that taking Soledar, 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Bakhmut, is likely Moscow’s immediate military objective and part of a strategy to encircle Bakhmut.