2023-05-22 19:32:07
“Now we have to defend.” Colonel Yuri Knutov, in the Russian army reserve, is blunt about the course that Moscow must take in the coming days in Bakhmut. The occupation of the city center (or “liberation” in Kremlin jargon) is built on countless corpses. And except for a minimal number of episodes, experience shows how easily conquests change hands in this invasion. As Knutov think other military and analysts convinced that the war in the city reduced to rubble and ash has not ended with its capture by Russia.
Ukraine has lost this position on the Donbas front, that is true, but it retains some “minimal” redoubts to the north and south, apart from the feat of having mastered a routed retreat to, in return, entrench itself with some discipline in the suburbs The invading attack has been like a solid falling into the water: the advance of the Wagner Group paramilitaries, protected on their flanks by a shield of regular troops sent by the Kremlin, has driven the defenders to the suburbs. To the field where the Russian blood has not yet coagulated. “I’m in the trenches. We have strengthened ourselves in the positions” that only a few days ago housed the occupants, explains Yuriv, a young member of the Ukrainian assault brigades in a tweet to The Washington Post.
Bakhmut’s paradox. Now it is their owners who are trying to enter while the Russian ‘squatters’ erect fortifications at full speed and sweep away attempts at resistance building by building. They have also begun to gather the few civilians sheltering in the basements and, according to the pro-Russian authorities in Donetsk, the bomb squads are already in the “demining process”, aware that behind each door or next to the rubble of a street it can hide a bomb-trap.
The fight for this enclave has become a fanatical confrontation. Possibly neither Moscow nor kyiv will take it for granted until the last enemy standing in the region dies. The two governments have sublimated their psychological symbolism and generated an extreme collision of forces, to limits that some experts consider to be similar to the battle of Stalingrad in 1942 or that of Verdun in 1916.
Assaults in the north and south
The similarities with the latter are evident. The fighting between the French resistance and the German troops then lasted 300 days (in Bakhmut the fight exceeds 226) and cost some 800,000 lives (it is not known how many the Donbas front has taken). Other historians note more coincidences with the Battle of the Somme. Also set in 1916, the confrontation between the British and French with the German army to break their front line in northern France became the worst massacre of World War I. It turned into a war of attrition where British and German forces were reduced to the size of a reeling boxer. A similar situation could occur in Bakhmut, where there are suspicions that the enormous number of casualties recorded will hinder the course of the invasion in the coming months.
State of a block of flats after the impact of a missile in the center of the occupied city
Ukrainian Armed Forces
kyiv has indirectly acknowledged the loss of control of the city center by ensuring that it maintains control of some minimal points on the periphery. However, from there he considers it possible to put together a complex reconquest. “Wagner’s probable capture of the last small area west of Bakhmut does not affect the ongoing Ukrainian counterattacks to the north and south,” the Washington War Institute (ISW) confirmed on Monday. Raids are daggers. They basically consist of a give and take between the two enemies to control the tall buildings of the city (actually, its ruins) and have superiority of fire over the enemy. The fieryness is such that there have even been fights for control over the remains of a downed Soviet Mig-29.
The magic word is flank. «The enemy will continue to try to activate his movement on the flanks. Not from a military point of view, but rather a political one”, weighs in the digital media ‘KP’ Colonel Yunot, who believes that the Ukrainians “will need to recover positions not only around the city, but also in itself. At least capture a microscopic foothold” to boost the morale of the troops and show the West that it is worth continuing to invest in weapons aimed at expelling the invaders from the country.
An uninhabitable ghost town
Bakhmut is no longer a life option for anyone. Not, of course, for its former 70,000 inhabitants, almost all of whom have already settled outside this enclave where not a house remains without damage. The Mariupol disaster, which fell into Russian hands just a year ago, is repeated. The vast majority of its population was relocated or died under bombs, sniper fire, hunger, or cold. Many of its former residents have ended up in Russia, others have managed to spread out across Europe. Horror stories are the same between each other. Civilians do not war. They get fire from everyone.
The only standing buildings barely conserve beyond the framework.
Reuters
Far from the mutilated bodies and that acrid smoke of Mariupol, on the occasion of the anniversary, a 33-year-old woman recalled this weekend in the press how she, her daughter and her husband still suffer from post-traumatic syndrome and react with fear to any noise strange. They took refuge for months in a basement, huddled together with dozens of neighbors. “Some risked going out for food. And several did not return ». The courtyards of the buildings were filled with bodies, layers and layers of rotting meat that had to be buried to avoid the smell and epidemics. Her daughter once asked her why dogs devoured “people”, in reference to the corpses scattered on the street. She herself “was like a wolf” at night, “When my daughter slept, she would pick me up on all fours, cry and scream.” “Everyone abandoned us, even ours left us there,” she recounts.
Almost no one has returned. Hardly a neighborhood has been rebuilt. The one that Putin visited a few weeks ago accompanied by photographers and television as a crude example of Russian reconstruction. According to the Kievites, those few blocks have been filled with the marginal population and “snitchers”, pro-Russian supporters of the Kremlin.
Bakhmut is no longer a safe place for the dogs of war. The ISW considers that the mercenaries of the Wagner Group suffer a “state of exhaustion” that makes it incapable of leaving the center of the city and “continuing the fight outside”, in the suburbs. The experts do not believe that it will be possible for the Russian troops either. advance from the newly won position towards Kostyantynivka, Slavyansk or Kramatorsk: first they must cross Ukrainian defenses, open areas, industrial estates and built-up neighborhoods where ambushes are safe.
The Western view is that the invaders will use the time to create their own strongholds and protect supply routes, mindful of the difficulties of fortifying a rubble wasteland. The military high command in Kiev is convinced that the enclave will eventually return to Ukraine or “it will be of no use” to the Russians, since “everything is ruins and dead.”
Remains of a missile in a street, when the siege was still in its first weeks.
The US president, Joe Biden, estimated this Sunday in Hiroshima, where he met with Volodimir Zelenski in the framework of the G-7 summit, that probably 100,000 Russian fighters have died in Bakhmut. It may seem crazy, but it is doable. It has been 224 days of war. Moscow puts the death toll on the Ukrainian side at over 50,000, although it is generally accepted that the final number will never be known. There is an indeterminate number of corpses not removed from the battlefield and of missing soldiers, synonymous with the fact that they have vanished under missiles, have lost their lives due to shots or mines in inaccessible areas, or their remains remain under the rubble.
dull or professional
The only certain thing is the capital carnage. And the uncertainty about the weight it will have in the future. The F-16s promised by Europe will not fly until autumn. months left. Biden long ago advised Zelensky to forget about Bakhmut and focus his efforts on the spring counteroffensive. kyiv has ignored it, but it has withdrawn some experienced battalions from the front line to preserve them for this operation. Even so, the West thinks that the Zelensky government has taken an enormous risk. French advisers have stated that while Russia “has had no problem sending convicts and criminals with no military experience to the meat grinder”, Ukraine has had to rely on its “‘good’ soldiers” at some stages of the offensive. According to Russian sources, its rockets have destroyed at least 300 armored vehicles, of which 95 were reportedly delivered by NATO.
The appreciation is not trivial. Commander Dmitry Steshin, an expert from the Russian ‘Pravda’, explains to this Moscow newspaper that one of the keys to the invading advance in Bakhmut has been the bombardment of the Ukrainian rearguard in Chasiv Yar, with the consequent destruction of a large part of its logistics : from weapons and fuel to other supplies, most of them Western. “Western advisers supporting the Ukrainian armed forces are useless in close-range street battles. Another unpleasant discovery has been the role of Western mercenaries. They are dull or professional. The idiots at the front are useless, and the professionals are ready to fight, but not ready to die.” The Bakhmut paradox: kyiv says the same about its enemies.
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