Looking at footage taken by a drone camera, Ukrainian battalion commander Oleg Shiryaev warned his men in nearby trenches that Russian forces were advancing across a field toward a grove of trees outside the city of Bakhmut.
The leader of the 228th battalion of the 127th Kharkov Territorial Defense Brigade ordered a mortar team to prepare. A goal was set. An orange flash roared from the mortar tube, and an explosion tore a new crater into a hill already scarred by shells.
“We are making progress,” Shiryaev said after a drone image showed a downed Russian fighter. “We fight for every tree, every trench, every bunker.”
Russian forces declared victory in the eastern city last month after the longest and bloodiest battle since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 15 months ago. But Ukrainian defenders like Shiryaev are not backing down. Instead they keep up the pressure and continue to fight from positions on the western outskirts of Bakhmut.
That gives commanders in Moscow something else to think about before an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive appears to be taking shape.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Russia was trying to create an impression of calm around Bakhmut, when in reality artillery fire was continuing at an intensity similar to the height of fighting for the city. The struggle, she said, was entering a new phase.
“The battle for the Bakhmut area has not stopped, it is ongoing, it just takes different forms,” ??Maliar, in his usual military gear, said in an interview from a military media center in Kiev. Russian forces are now trying unsuccessfully to drive Ukrainian fighters out of the “dominant highlands” overlooking Bakhmut. “We hold them very firmly,” Maliar said.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, the area around Bakhmut is only a part of the more than 1,000 kilometers of front line that the Russian military must maintain. That task could be complicated by the withdrawal of mercenaries from private military contractor Wagner, who helped take the city. They will be replaced by Russian soldiers.
Ukrainian forces have carried out opportunistic attacks, trying to make small gains and taking strategic positions, especially from two flanks in the northwest and southwest, where the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade has operated, according to authorities.
Russia had envisioned the capture of Bakhmut as a partial culmination of its goal of taking the eastern Donbas region, the Ukrainian industrial heartland. Now his forces have been forced to regroup, rotate fighters and rearm just to hold the city. Wagner’s owner announced a withdrawal from the site after admitting that he had lost more than 20,000 men.
Maliar described the nine months of fighting Wagner’s forces in almost existential terms: “If they had not been destroyed during the defense of Bakhmut, one can imagine that all these tens of thousands would have pushed further into Ukrainian territory.”
The fate of Bakhmut, largely reduced to rubble, has taken a backseat in recent days due to attacks on Kiev almost every night, a series of drone strikes near Moscow that no one has claimed responsibility for, and growing expectations that the Ukrainian government will try to catch up.
But the fight for the city could still be significant for a while. Moscow has attached great importance to his capture, which has been portrayed triumphantly in the Russian media. If it escaped Russian control, it would be a political embarrassment for President Vladimir Putin.
Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analysis, a US research group, said on a podcast this week that the victory poses new challenges to retaining Bakhmut.
Following the withdrawal of Wagner’s fighters, Russian forces “are going to be increasingly focused on Bakhmut (…) and find it difficult to defend,” Kogman told “War on the Rocks” in an interview published on Tuesday. .
“So they may not hold on to Bakhmut, and in the end it could all be for nothing for them,” he added.
A Western official speaking on condition of anonymity said Russian airborne forces played an important role in replacing Wagner’s outgoing troops, something that “will probably upset” airborne commanders, who see the task as a new one. erosion of their “formerly elite status” in the military.
Ukrainian forces have clawed at tracts of territory on their flanks, a few hundred meters a day, to consolidate defensive lines and look for opportunities to recapture urban areas of the city, according to a Ukrainian analyst.
“The target in Bakhmut is not Bakhmut itself, which has turned into ruins,” military analyst Roman Svitan said by phone. The Ukrainians’ goal is to hold the high ground to the west and maintain a defensive arc outside the city.
More generally, Ukraine wants to ballast Russian forces and seize the initiative before the counteroffensive, in what military analysts describe as “shaping operations” to set the terms of the combat environment and put the enemy on the defensive. and reactive.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, said the strategic objective in the Bakhmut area is to “slow down the enemy and destroy as many personnel and equipment as possible” while avoiding a Russian advance or flanking maneuver.
Analyst Mathieu Boulègue questioned whether Bakhmut offered any lessons or significance for the future of warfare.
Military superiority matters, he noted, but also “information superiority,” the ability to “create subterfuge, create obfuscation of one’s own strength, being able to move in the shadows.”
Boulègue, a senior adviser to the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House think tank in London, said such strategies “could determine which side gains an advantage that catches the other side by surprise and changes the course of the war.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project