Understanding the Bakhmut War:Will it be the end game?
The military of Ukraine has reported "bloody battles unprecedented in recent decades" in the eastern city of Bakhmut, while the death toll from a Russian strike on residential structures in adjacent Sloviansk has risen to 11, as per the reports in the 2nd week of April. The alleged fighting came when the Russian defence ministry said that militants from its Wagner mercenary squad had taken control of two additional Bakhmut districts.
Despite more than 90% of the population that has left the city and much of it is in ruin, Russia and Ukraine continue to fight for the little city of Bakhmut. After eight months of trench warfare, Ukrainian troops are surrounded on three sides, Kyiv's supply lines are fraying, and Moscow claims control of around two-thirds of Bakhmut, including a piece of the centre. Despite severe casualties on both sides, Ukraine has pledged to continue defending the city and is engaged in vicious street fighting in the western areas. Some senior Western military specialists have urged that, the Ukrainian soldiers should retreat to a newly constructed defensive line, but Kyiv has refused repeatedly. Ukraine's president, Mr Volodymyr Zelensky, has depicted "Fortress Bakhmut" as a symbol of defiance and resistance against the Russian dominance that is draining the Russian military. Though he did indicate sometime before that his men may retreat if they fear being encircled. The loss of this city would represent Moscow's first major conquest since mid-2022, as well as a boost in its larger battle against Ukraine. It is further claimed by the Russian governement that its soldiers are decimating the Ukrainian military and that they will win over Bakhmut.
BACKGROUND
Following Ukraine's counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson in late 2022, the Bakhmut-Soledar front became an important focus of the conflict, being one of the few front lines in Ukraine where Russia remained on the offensive. Assaulting Russian forces were strengthened by units redeployed from the Kherson front, as well as newly mobilised recruits, attacks on the city escalated in November 2022. By this point, much of the front line had devolved into positional trench warfare, with both sides taking heavy casualties but making little progress. The battles in the Bakhmut area have been compared to those of World War I and II. Russian forces have already taken control of the city's eastern side, up to the Bakhmutka River. Bakhmut, formerly known as the city of Artemivsk, since the Soviet times, was the scene of the 2014 Artemivsk war between Ukraine and the self-proclaimed rebel Donetsk People's Republic. During the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine in April, pro-Russian separatists controlled portions of the city, and a Ukrainian special forces unit, together with the National Guard, was ordered to oust the separatists from the city. The separatists were evacuated to the city's outskirts, where hostilities raged until July 2014 and later they were ultimately driven out. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the main aim was to take the Donbas area, including the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. The initially launched attack on Bakhmut was part of an attempt to encircle Ukrainian soldiers around Sievierodonetsk-Lysychansk; when joined with another advance from the Lyman direction, it formed a pocket and imprisoned Ukrainian forces there.
Following the loss of Popasna on May 22, Ukrainian forces retreated from the city to strengthen positions at Bakhmut. Meanwhile, Russian soldiers advanced on the Bakhmut-Lysychansk route, putting Ukrainian troops in the Lysychansk-Sievierodonetsk area in jeopardy. The Russian checkpoint along the route was eventually removed, but combat continued on May 30 along the Kostiantynivka-Bakhmut highway, which Ukrainian forces successfully defended. The shelling of Bakhmut continued throughout the months of June and July, intensifying after the fight of Siversk began on July 3. Following the battles of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk in early July, Russian and separatist troops seized control of the whole Luhansk oblast, and the battleground switched to Bakhmut and Soledar. On July 25, Ukrainian forces retreated from the Vuhlehirska Power Station and the surrounding town of Novoluhanske, handing Russian and separatist forces a small tactical advantage in the direction of Bakhmut. Then it was on July 27, the Russian bombardment of Bakhmut killed three people and injured three more. Prior to the Bakhmut engagement, Ukrainian Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskiy had said that Russia had a five-to-one personnel superiority against Ukraine on the eastern front, which might give them a lot of advantage.
WHY IS BAKHMUT IMPORTANT?
The fight of Bakhmut has been called one of the deadliest engagements of the twenty-first century, with the battlefield characterised as a "meat grinder" and a "vortex" for both the Ukrainian and Russian troops. With extraordinarily high deaths, costly ground assaults that gained very little territory, and shell-shocked landscapes, the volunteers, journalists, and government officials compared this combat in Bakhmut to battlefield circumstances on World War I's western front.
The city lies in Ukraine's Donetsk region, which is predominantly Russian-speaking and very much industrialised, and Moscow aims to conquer with its self-proclaimed "special military operation." It had a pre-war population of 70,000-80,000 people, but Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk reported in the month of March that less than 4,000 citizens have remained, including only 38 children. The Ukrainian government has been continuously declaring that, Bakhmut is significant not just as a major military terrain but also as a strategic emblem of Ukrainian resistance. Bakhmut is a small city in terms of population and area, but its location at the intersection of two major supply routes, that is the M03 north to Slovyansk and the T0504 west to Kostyantynivka, which makes it a critical logistical junction for any future Russian progress. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his defence team were correct to devote resources to defending this stance. Ukraine's soldiers converted the city into a rock, breaking the Russian wave in eastern Ukraine. Bakhmut has been turned from a critical piece of operational terrain to a significant piece of strategically symbolic territory as a result of their tenacious defence. The city's prominence as an image of Ukrainian fortitude against the aggressors rose with each minute the defenders held each metre of ground. According to Zelenskyy, the city is a "fortress of Ukraine's morale."
BATTLE CONDITIONS
Russian assault soldiers have mostly comprised of Wagner Group mercenaries and ex-convicts, reinforcements from other Ukrainian front lines, and freshly mobilised volunteers termed as mobiks by Ukrainians. Wagner's soldiers were claimed to be made up of a majority of recruited, untrained ex-convicts and a minority of well-trained contractors who served as group commanders and encrypted radio broadcasts.
Some commentators compared Russian tactics to Soviet-style human wave attacks, with waves of soldiers continuously assaulting Ukrainian lines. According to some Ukrainian soldiers, the Wagner mercenaries use their recruited ex-convicts as first-wave human bait to reveal the Ukrainian positions, with those who refused to advance being threatened with execution by firing squads or barrier troops, and those who were injured in the assaults were rarely rescued.
Russia has attacked Bakhmut with Iranian-made drones after receiving 450 of them in mid-October 2022. Russia began replacing the Wagner forces with a far better trained National Guard of Russia, called Rosgvardia and paratroopers in late January 2023, allowing them to make significant advances in the Bakhmut area. The Ukrainian defenders are a hodgepodge of units, initially consisting of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade and the 58th Motorised Brigade, which were subsequently reinforced by several additional units, including special forces and territory defence groups, to cover gaps left by high casualties. Units are also rotated on a regular basis to replace wounded and minimise combat weariness. On January 10, 2023, the Polish think tank Rochan Consulting predicted that Ukraine will have ten brigades fighting in Bakhmut, totaling around 30,000 soldiers.
Ukrainian commanders have expended substantial resources in Bakhmut with the goal of keeping Russia distracted in order to prevent subsequent offensives. The New York Times, on the other hand, noted that Ukraine's employment of well-trained National Guard and infantry units against poorly-trained The Wagner troops was tying down Ukraine's well-trained units and preventing Ukraine from undertaking offensives not just now but in the future.
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?
If the publicly released information by the government websites is accurate, the lines of communication to Bakhmut have reached their breaking point. The M03 has already been captured, and the T0504 has either been seized or is within a hundred metres of Russian forces, placing any logistical or manoeuvre movement along it within range of direct fire from Russian armoured formations. To the north, the final available alternative supply route, the narrow O0506, is still accessible, but Russian soldiers are likely only a few hundred metres away.
Others may be more hopeful, arguing that the Ukrainians should hold out until the German-supplied Leopard tanks and their Ukrainian operators, which have just completed training, can be used in the summer attack. The logistical assistance and force organisation necessary to incorporate this much-touted batch of Western weaponry into Ukrainian units might take weeks or even months. Bakhmut may only have a few days before being surrounded.
Many observers question Bakhmut's overall strategic usefulness, remarking that Russia's resources and lives expended in invading the city considerably outweigh its significance. Some analysts have also noted that seizing Bakhmut would bring Kramatorsk and Sloviansk within range of Russian weaponry. Russia's costly assault, according to Konrad Muzyka and Russian security expert Mark Galeotti, is a matter of both preserving prestige and the sunk cost fallacy that Russian forces had already expended so much of the manpower into the war effort on other fronts that they may as well fight with everything they have got in order to seize the city. Retired Ukrainian colonel Serhiy Hrabskyi stated the Wagner Group was looking for glory in seizing Bakhmut, pointing out that commander Yevgeny Prigozhin stands to benefit financially and politically if Wagner controls the city on behalf of the Russian government. Wagner, according to Prighozhin, was purposefully turning Bakhmut into a meat grinder in order to inflict huge fatalities on Ukrainian soldiers.
CONCLUSION
Another aspect of the struggle for Bakhmut is the disparity in military methods between the Ukrainians and the Russians. Russia merely has untrained conscripts. And what we're witnessing on the battlefield - and Bakhmut is a great illustration - is that Russia has levelled it with carpet bombing. What the Ukrainians have been doing is methodically attacking their resupply points, where their leadership is located, and their bomb dumps. Russia's approach is a battle of attrition similar to those seen in the two world wars, whereas Ukraine employs contemporary integrated military thinking. It appears to be a collision of civilisations, with the Russians having only fought in 20th-century combat and the Ukrainians engaging in 21st-century warfare utilising Western technology.
Bakhmut has been the cornerstone of Ukraine's Donbas defence. It was a meat-grinder that chewed into Russian formations, costing them blood, wealth, and willpower. It was a stronghold of the Ukrainian resistance spirit, instilling faith in both citizens and soldiers that, despite the odds, their nation would be restored one day. If Bakhmut falls, Russia will have won, which would be a rare bit of positive news to boost morale. Ukraine would suffer a political and symbolic setback due to this. On social media, Ukrainians would no longer be able to exclaim, "Bakhmut holds!" Few, though, believe there will be a significant military impact. The fall of Bakhmut will not essentially mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this battle, this was stated by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.
REFERENCES
- Altman, H. (2022, November 28). Ukraine Situation Report: The Bloody Battle For Bakhmut. The Drive. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-the-bloody-battle-for-bakhmut
- Bakhmut: Why Russia and Ukraine are battling so hard for one small city. (2023, March 15). The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/world/russia-ukraine-war-significance-of-bakhmut-8498035/
- Battle of Bakhmut: Ukrainian soldiers worry Russians begin to ‘taste victory.’ (2023, March 15). Kyiv Independent. https://kyivindependent.com/battle-of-bakhmut-ukrainian-soldiers-worry-russians-begin-to-taste-victory/
- Beardsworth, J. (2022, December 12). Explainer: Why is Russia Trying So Hard to Capture the Small Ukrainian City of Bakhmut? The Moscow Times. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/12/why-is-russia-trying-so-hard-to-capture-the-small-ukrainian-city-of-bakhmut-a79672
- Hanlon, G. (2023, April 18). How Long Should Ukrainian Forces Defend Bakhmut? Lessons from Stalingrad. Modern War Institute. https://mwi.usma.edu/how-long-should-ukrainian-forces-defend-bakhmut-lessons-from-stalingrad/
- Marson, J. (2023, April 16). Battle for Ukraine’s Bakhmut Reaches Highest Intensity Yet. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/battle-for-ukraines-bakhmut-reaches-highest-intensity-yet-7808fb6b
- Russia and Ukraine Battle for Bakhmut: Live Updates - The New York Times. (2023, February 1). https://web.archive.org/web/20230201001810/https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/31/world/russia-ukraine-news
- Russia is hurling troops at the tiny Ukrainian town of Bakhmut. (n.d.). The Economist, from https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/12/06/russia-is-hurling-troops-at-the-tiny-ukrainian-town-of-bakhmut?ppccampaignID=&ppcadID=&ppcgclID=&utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=18151738051&ppcadID=&utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxYOiBhC9ARIsANiEIfahe4tiXZzv4jlmMY3rBWw_TCtjd52K7MilPEyHrkKCU0T16ssHAB0aAkVBEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
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Pic Courtsey-Pankaj Jha
(The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent views of CESCUBE.)
