Global Courant
OUTSIDE BAKHMUT, Ukraine (AP) — Watching footage from an overhead drone camera, Ukrainian battalion commander Oleg Shiryaev warned his men in nearby trenches that Russian troops were advancing across a field toward a patch of trees outside the city of Bakhmut.
The leader of the 228th Battalion of the 127th Kharkiv Territorial Defense Brigade then ordered a mortar squad to get ready. A target was locked. A mortar round blasted a loud orange and an explosion carved another crater into an already pockmarked hill.
“We are moving forward,” Shiryaev said after at least one drone image showed a Russian fighter downed. “We fight for every tree, every trench, every dugout.”
Russian troops last month declared victory in the eastern city after the longest, deadliest battle since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 15 months ago. But Ukrainian defenders love Shiryaev don’t retreat. Instead, they keep up the pressure and continue the battle from positions on the western edge of Bakhmut.
The pushback gives commanders in Moscow something to think about before a long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive that seems to be taking shape.
Ukrainian deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar said Russia was trying to give the impression of calm around Bakhmut, but in fact artillery shelling continues at levels similar to those at the height of the battle for the city in to take. The battle, she said, is moving into a new phase.
“The battle for the Bakhmut area has not stopped; it’s ongoing, it’s just taking on different forms,” Maliar, dressed in her trademark fatigues, said in an interview from a military media center in Kiev. Russian troops are now trying – but failing – to drive Ukrainian fighters from the “dominant heights” overlooking Bakhmut.
“We hold them tight,” she said.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, the area around Bakhmut is only part of the more than 1,000-kilometer-long front line that the Russian army must maintain. That task could be complicated by the withdrawal of the mercenaries from it private military contractor Wagner Group who helped control the city. They will be replaced by Russian soldiers.
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For the Ukrainian forces, recent work has been opportunistic – trying to extort small gains from the enemy and take strategic positions, particularly from two flanks in the northwest and southwest, where the Ukrainian 3rd Separate Assault Brigade has been active, they said. officials.
Russia envisioned the capture of Bakhmut as a partial fulfillment of its ambition to take control of the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine’s industrial heartland. Now the forces are forced to regroup, rotate fighters and re-arm to hold the city. Wagner’s owner announced a withdrawal after confirmation the loss of more than 20,000 of his men.
Maliar described the nine-month battle against the Wagner forces in almost existential terms: “Had they not been destroyed in the defense of Bakhmut, one can imagine that all these tens of thousands would have penetrated deeper into Ukrainian territory.”
Bakhmut’s fate, largely in ruins, has been overshadowed in recent days by near-night attacks on Kiev, a series of unclaimed drone strikes near Moscow and growing expectations that the Ukrainian government will try to retake territory .
But the battle for the city could still have a lingering impact. Moscow made the most of its conquest, epitomized by triumphalism in the Russian media. Any derailment of the Russian grip would embarrass President Vladimir Putin politically.
Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyses, a US research group, noted in a podcast this week that the victory brings new challenges in keeping Bakhmut.
With Wagner fighters in retreat, Russian troops will be “increasingly fixated on Bakhmut … and will find it difficult to defend,” Kofman told me. “War on the Rocks” in an interview posted Tuesday.
“And so they may not hold Bakhmut, and the whole thing may have been for nothing for them later on,” he added.
A Western official speaking on condition of anonymity said Russian airborne troops are closely involved in replacing departing Wagner troops – a move “likely to thwart” airborne command, who see the task as further erosion of their “formerly elite status”. ” in the army.
Ukrainian troops have been taking back swathes of territory on the flanks – a few hundred meters a day – to strengthen defense lines and look for opportunities to recapture some urban parts of the city, a Ukrainian analyst said.
“The target in Bakhmut is not Bakhmut itself, which has been reduced to rubble,” military analyst Roman Svitan said by phone. The goal for the Ukrainians is to hold the western heights and maintain a defensive arc outside the city.
More broadly, Ukraine wants to bolster Russian forces and take the initiative ahead of the counter-offensive — part of what military analysts call “shaping operations” to set the conditions of the battle environment and put an enemy in a defensive, reactive stance.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesman for the Ukrainian forces in the east, said the strategic objective in the Bakhmut area was “to contain the enemy and destroy as much personnel and equipment as possible” while preventing a Russian breakthrough or outflanking maneuver .
Analyst Mathieu Boulegue questioned whether Bakhmut would have lessons or importance for the coming war.
Military superiority is important, he said, but so is “information superiority” — the ability “to create subterfuge, to create cloudiness of your force, to be able to move in the shadows.”
Boulegue, an advisory fellow on the Russia and Eurasia program at the Chatham House think tank in London, said those tactics “may determine which side gains an advantage that surprises the other side and turns the tide of the war.”
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Keaten reported from Kiev, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Hanna Arhirova and Illia Novikov in Kiev, Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia, and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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