Global Courant 2023-05-31 23:21:51
After 10 months of warfare, ground attacks have largely come to a standstill and guns have largely stalled in the town of Bakhmut.
Russian troops paused to take out the Wagner Group mercenaries leading the battle to capture the eastern Ukrainian city. Ukrainian troops halted a flanking maneuver that recently captured the high ground around Bakhmut “to carry out other military tasks”.
In the 66th week of the war, only one combat conflict was reported – on Saturday.
“There is no active fighting there — neither in the city nor on the flanks,” Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar said in a Telegram post.
“Instead, the enemy is actively shelling the outskirts of the city and the access roads to it.”
in a video interview he posted on his Telegram channel, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin said he had lost 20,000 mercenaries in the battle for Bakhmut alone.
The Russian Defense Ministry has not said how many support troops have been killed by airborne and mechanized units.
“It’s hard to imagine how many people died… I’m sure there are still rotting bodies everywhere,” retired US Colonel Seth Krummrich told Al Jazeera.
“They were talking about human waves… Prigozhin got really frustrated when he pushed all these mercenaries in, trying to take 10 meters of ground,” said Krummrich, who has led special forces detachments in Afghanistan and the Middle East. East, and currently serves as a vice president for Global Guardian, a security consultant.
Founder of the private mercenary group Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin makes a statement about the beginning of the withdrawal of his troops from Bakhmut and handing over their positions to regular Russian troops, in the course of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Bakhmut, Ukraine (Press Service of “Concord” / Handout via Reuters)
The calm before the storm
Russia claimed victory in Bakhmut on May 21, and nine days later Ukrainian Eastern Armed Forces spokesman Serhiy Cherevaty admitted that the city itself was in Russian hands.
“The enemy fought for 10 months for this district center, but only managed to capture it at the end,” he said.
He hinted at an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive. “The Russians are well aware that, in addition to military losses, failure to keep the city could also cause them great reputational damage,” Cherevaty said.
“I think the Russians are setting themselves up for an incredible failure,” Krummrich said. “With the approaching counter-offensive, they risk losing Bakhmut and much, much more. If they now claim a Russian victory over the Russian people, they will lose a lot if their supply lines are cut and they eventually have to leave the city.
Ukraine has said it has 12 trained and equipped battalions ready to launch the counter-offensive, and Krummrich believed the weather was now the only factor holding them back.
“The units are trained, so I think as soon as the ground dries up, they’ll leave.”
“The Russians are in Bakhmut, they understand what’s coming, they understand they will be attacked,” he said.
On May 28, the General Staff of Ukraine said 80 Russian troops had left their positions in Lysychansk, the city in Luhansk province taken by Russian forces last July. Another 30 Russian troops deserted in Bakhmut, taking military equipment with them, staff said.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the military company Wagner Group speaks as he holds a Russian national flag in front of his soldiers in Bakhmut, Ukraine (Prigozhin Press Service via AP)
Slings and arrows
Instead of continuing the exhausting ground battle for Bakhmut, Russia and Ukraine turned into a largely psychological war in the air.
On May 26, the Ukrainian Air Force said it destroyed an air force of 31 drones and 17 missiles overnight, including 10 Kh-101 and Kh-155 missiles fired from Russian aircraft over the Caspian Sea, seven S-300 and S -400 repurposed air defense missiles fired from occupied Zaporizhia, and 31 Iranian Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones.
The targets were “critical infrastructure and armed forces infrastructure” in the east of the country, the air force said.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov said the operation had mostly propaganda value.
“The enemy is eager to show that their ‘analogovnet’ weapons can do something with the Ukrainian army and Western weapons. But it doesn’t show,” he said.
Two days later, Ukrainian air defenses shot down at least 40 drones launched by Russia at the capital Kyiv, the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said. Falling debris killed a man and injured a woman.
The pre-dawn attacks took place on the last Sunday in May, when the capital celebrates “Kyiv Day”, the anniversary of its official founding 1,541 years ago.
And the next day, the commander of the Ukrainian army, General Valery Zaluzhny, said that the armed forces had destroyed all 11 Iskander-K and Iskander-M cruise missiles launched north of the Ukrainian border.
But on May 30, Ukraine appeared to have responded by sending eight drones to Moscow. Russia said it blocked or shot down all eight drones.
In a post on Telegram after the attack, Alexander Khinshtein, a prominent member of Russia’s parliament from the ruling United Russia bloc, said three of the eight drones were downed over Rublyovka, a suburb west of Moscow where a large part of the Russian political and business elite live.
A man stands next to his apartment building, which was badly damaged in a massive Russian drone strike, in Kiev, Ukraine (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
“This is clearly a sign of terrorist activity,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukrainian Colonel Petro Chernyk commented: “If drones of unknown origin break through multi-layered defenses and fly practically to the capital of a country that considers itself a superpower, will their weapons have any value?”
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin blamed the defense ministry for a weak defense.
“You, the Defense Ministry, have done nothing to launch an offensive,” Prigozhin said.
“How dare you let the drones reach Moscow?”
Ukraine denied responsibility. “We have nothing directly to do with this,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said.
The Russian ambassador to Washington blamed the US for encouraging the attack and scoffed at the Biden administration’s statement that it was gathering information about the incident.
“What are these attempts to hide behind the phrase that they ‘gather information’?” Anatoly Antonov said in comments published on Telegram.
“This is an encouragement to Ukrainian terrorists.”
On May 29, another attack by two drones caused an explosion in Russia’s Pskov region near the border with Belarus, damaging the administrative building of an oil pipeline, local governor Mikhail Vedernikov said.
Ukraine has at times initially denied responsibility for attacks it later claimed.
The New York Times reported that unnamed US sources said Ukrainian special forces or military intelligence agencies were behind a similar drone attack on the Kremlin on May 3.
On May 27, the chief of Ukraine’s intelligence service confirmed Kiev’s involvement in an explosion that severely damaged the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Russian-occupied Crimea, seven months after it happened.
Shaping operations
Ukraine has also denied involvement in an invasion of Russian territory on May 22 by Russian nationalists opposed to Putin. The Russian commander of that raid said his group would return soon.
“I think you’ll see us again on that side,” Denis Kapustin said at a press conference in Ukraine, describing himself as the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps.
“Any operation that takes place on the territory of Russia forces the military leadership to move a large number of troops exactly to that quadrant, exposing some parts of the front, parts of the border,” he said.
“The formation of the battlefield is now taking place for the counter-offensive,” Krummrich said.
“We see the attacks behind enemy lines, we see the attacks in Russia by those militias. We see the drone attacks in Moscow. That all determines what comes next,” he said, adding that the complexity annoyed Russian decision-makers, who were already politically divided over a war not going well.
“Russia must now defend all the way back to their capital. They are already spread thin. So they will have to make a lot of complex decisions about where to place their troops. If the last 15 months are any indicator, they will definitely put their forces in the wrong place and they will lose,” Krummrich said.
“We have to prepare for a heavy war,” said Wagner boss Prigozhin in his interview.
“We are in such a condition that we could lose Russia – that is the main problem … We must impose martial law.”
Russian former president Dmitry Medvedev also tried to prepare public opinion for a long battle.
“This conflict will last for a very long time, probably decades,” the RIA news agency quoted Medvedev as saying on a visit to Vietnam.
US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley said Ukraine could liberate all of its territories by military means, “but probably not in the foreseeable future”, adding that such a war would be “bloody and difficult”.
“Russia will not win this war militarily,” Milley said.
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