Almost nothing is left in Bachmut, only mercenaries from the Wagner group and Russian troops. The Ukrainian city in the province of Donetsk is now a landscape of utter destruction, like Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, Grozny in the wars in Chechnya, like the devastated Berlin showing Germany in the year zero. But unlike Roberto Rossellini’s film about the sunken German capital after World War II, the battle in Bachmut continues. The Ukrainian army, retreating to the outskirts of the city, has changed strategy to turn what they define as a “fortress city” into a mousetrap for Kremlin forces. “The last few days have been very intense. “We have left Bakhmut, but we are advancing on the flanks,” says a Ukrainian soldier from the front in an outpost three kilometers from the city. Kiev is trying to keep Bakhmut as an open front in the counteroffensive plan. The aim is to keep the Kremlin’s troops there to prevent their deployment elsewhere, pocket them and destroy them.
The urban core of Bakhmut is now occupied by Moscow forces. Ten months after the bloody siege began, mercenaries from the Wagner Group took control of the city last week. In the city with its wide, green avenues, which had a population of 70,000 before the war, there are barely a thousand civilians left, says a soldier from the Ukrainian special forces. Sick, insane people who have denied any chance to escape the hell of bombs, artillery attacks and snipers.
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But Bachmut has also become hell for Wagner’s Russian mercenaries. According to reports published this week by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the dark and controversial leader of the company dedicated to recruiting from Russian prisons, 20,000 of his men have died taking the fortress city. The US government in early May estimated the number of Russian deaths in Bakhmut over the past five months at 20,000 and the total number of victims at 100,000.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last Sunday congratulated Prigozhin on his capture — “liberation,” the Kremlin’s statement said — of the city, which is locked in a heated conflict with the leadership of Russia’s Defense Ministry and General Staff. Prigozhin has assured that he is withdrawing from the city, leaving the relief and defense to the regular troops from Moscow. But the reality is that the battle over Bakhmut – which has become a political symbol for Russia and its only breakthrough for many months – is not over. International analysts have confirmed that Ukraine’s strategy over the past month has been to gradually withdraw from the 20% of the city it still controlled to fight on the city limits.
A Ukrainian soldier in a trench near the Bakhmut front, Monday. LIBKOS (THE COUNTRY)
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An officer of the Ukrainian 63rd Infantry Brigade fighting on the Donetsk front vividly explained the logic of the operation a few weeks ago. With his hand outstretched, this soldier withdrew his middle finger while keeping the others outstretched: the aim was to allow the Russians access to the places where the Ukrainians were retreating while the other phalanxes surrounded the enemy.
While the eyes of half the world are on the Kiev counter-offensive, which may be decisive for the future of the war, some voices on the ground claim that the first steps have already begun. In small doses, during raids and in the form of attacks on Kremlin weapons. Mikhailo Podoliak, Zelenskyy’s adviser, confirmed this Thursday: “The counter-offensive will not be a single event that begins on a certain day, at a certain hour, with the cutting of a red ribbon. “There are dozens of different actions to crush the occupying forces in different directions, what happened yesterday, what will happen today and tomorrow,” he started on his social networks.
Kiev continues its operations of confusion and psychological warfare, heating up the atmosphere. Valery Zaluzhni, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, released a haunting video this Saturday implying that the crucial hour has already begun. “It’s time to take back what’s ours,” shout Ukrainian uniformed officers in the almost cinematic shot, which also includes some of the weapons provided by the Western Allies: Leopard 2s and Himars tanks.
Video published by Valery ZaluzhniVideo: Valery Zaluzhni via Telegram
Ukraine will not announce when and where to launch the offensive, for obvious reasons. It is to try to advance on the southern front (which is considered one of the most crucial at this stage) and on two fronts in the mining region of Donbas. . Oleksi Danilov, secretary of the National Defense and Security Council of Ukraine, has noted that the attack could start “tomorrow, the day after or within a week”. It is a “historic opportunity,” he told the BBC on Saturday, and the Ukrainian government “must not fail.”
In this scenario, Bakhmut, a city with little military value, continues to play an important role. Ukraine has suffered great casualties trying to maintain control of the city, to which it sent some of its best men at one point in the war. And there were periods of this ten-month siege when both some of its western allies and some of its forces stationed on the Bakhmut front questioned Kiev’s decision to try to hold it. One of those military skeptics about Bakhmut’s strategic importance now points out that the decision came at a high price, but that it also in many ways dealt a “decisive blow” to Putin’s forces that could be “decisive” in the counteroffensive .
The events in Bakhmut also intensified the war between Prigozhin and the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry, revealing “potential fissures” in the Kremlin circle, a Western intelligence source says.
Prigozhin (left) talks to a group of Wagner mercenaries, this is a still from a video released by the Russian companies showing the founder of the Russian military company on Wednesday. CONCORD PRESS SERVICE (via Portal)
Attacks by Ukrainian forces on Kremlin troops in the Bakhmut mousetrap have increased in intensity in recent days. According to several local sources, the Kiev army has managed to make some advances around the city. With this, Ukraine wants to ensure that Russia has fewer assets on other front points where the stakes are higher than in this area of Donetsk province.
In March, Putin ordered a new mobilization of more than 140,000 soldiers. According to forecasts by experts at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a body under Ukraine’s presidency, these new troops could be on the front lines by July. Ukraine would then have a window in June before the rotation of enemy troops. The British Ministry of Defense intelligence has already announced that Russia is sending several battalions to ensure control of Bakhmut.
Kiev tries to destroy the highest positions on the outskirts and buildings serving as Russian watchtowers. “Go on [el área de] Bakhmut gives us the opportunity to enter the city should circumstances change. And that will happen for sure,” General Oleksandr Sirski, commander of the Ukrainian land army, said in a May 21 statement, already indicating that the priority is to advance on the flanks and encircle the city.
Ukrainian tankers near Bakhmut this Tuesday. Efrem Lukatsky (Associated Press/LaPresse)
Russia has invested so much in its attempts to capture Bakhmut that analysts believe it will have tremendous difficulty in trying to do the same elsewhere in the region. Meanwhile, Ukraine is struggling to maintain its operations in the face of the counter-offensive, for which the Kremlin is already entrenched on some points. Kiev has stepped up attacks on arms and fuel depots in Russian-held Ukrainian territories. Attacks also took place on Russian territory. Ukraine is using similar measures that have proven effective over the past year, with counter-offensives driving Moscow forces out of Kharkov province and the western part of South Kherson. The major attack is preceded by the disruption of supplies to the Russian troops.
Also in the playbook is the Confusion card, which comes before a large troop movement to distract the enemy from where the main attack will be. And this is part of this week’s invasion of Russia’s Belgorod province by anti-Putin Russian paramilitaries, backed by other foreign forces and the Kiev army. The soldiers (who belong to the Foreign Legion of Ukraine) took control of about 30 square kilometers of Russian territory for almost two days. It was a smart maneuver, as Klaus Eriksen, an officer in the Danish Navy, opined on his social media, because it forces Russia to allocate resources to bolster its border defenses.
But the key over the past few weeks and over the next few days, several members of three special forces units urge from the ground, are small-unit incursions behind Russian lines. The aim is to collect information about the weakest points of the fortifications built by Russia over a length of 800 kilometers and, above all, to send information for targeted attacks and to create battlefields in the rear.
“People only think of Bakhmut, but further away there are other fronts that go unnoticed,” says an officer in a battalion stationed on the southern front — the Kherson and Dnipro fronts as they cross the Dnieper — The battalions, like others, were ordered to advance from their bases into Russian-held territory on the Bakhmut and Avdiivka fronts. The fighting, it is said, is already taking place far into the Russian zone.
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