The battle for Bachmut is not over – at least not yet. In recent days, Ukrainian assault brigades have bloodily reminded Moscow of this.
Lined up in civilian vehicles with dimmed lights, a company of soldiers waits silently in the dark on the side of the road. Further back a second company is parked, a single light in a car reveals a soldier’s face. Still further to the rear moves another company.
After months of fighting, the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bachmut appeared to be reaching a climax in recent days. Russian troops almost surrounded the city, some Ukrainian units retreated.
But suddenly, on Saturday morning, Ukrainian brigades went on the attack. Over the weekend, hundreds of troops joined the counter-offensive, launching attacks from the ground and shelling Russian positions with artillery from the surrounding hills.
Ukrainian commanders acknowledge that their forces in Bachmut are still at risk of being surrounded, but the fighting over the past weekend shows that the Ukrainian army, which has surprised the world with its fortitude, is not yet ready to give up Bachmut. How retaining the city fits into the broader plans is less clear.
Even before Ukraine stepped up its attack on the Russians in Bachmut over the weekend, Ukrainian troops had already beaten back Russian troops from the last main road into the city. This left both a supply line – which helped Ukrainian soldiers to control the Russian offensive for months – and an escape route should they decide to withdraw.
Little strategic value
“I am confident that Bachmut will hold,” said Colonel Yevhen Mezjevikin, commander of a combined tactical group fighting in Bachmut. “We have enough troops to drive the enemy out of this city, but it depends on the tasks of the command, whether that be holding the city or inflicting maximum losses on the enemy.”
Other soldiers on the ground seem much less confident.
Bachmoet, a city whose population was 70,000 before the war, has little strategic value. It was simply next in the firing line of a Russian offensive to take the eastern province of Donetsk. But the battle for the city created a defining moment in the war for both the Russian and Ukrainian armies. The battle is no longer about Bachmoet: it’s a marathon battle to see which army can break the other.
Russia has deployed tens of thousands of newly mobilized troops in a massive ground attack to take the city with mere fire and manpower. Ukraine has used every tactic of the past year of war, learned through painful experience, to hold its own and inflict as many casualties on the invader as possible. There is often fighting from destroyed building to building.
Ukrainian forces have been steadily losing ground, giving up villages and suburbs in recent weeks. And the late winter has been particularly hard. Weeks of freezing cold and the onset of the mud season have drained their strength, the soldiers say.
“The fog is constant, every night we see almost nothing,” says the commander of a combat drone unit attached to the 59th brigade in a video message from the front. He goes by the code name Madyar. “The temperature is above zero for the third day,” he adds. “Everything has melted. Mud up to the knee. It rains ten times a day. Makes it difficult to perform tactical tasks.”
Late last week, Madyar said his unit was withdrawing. Other units have done the same. It remains unclear whether the movements were part of a rotation or a controlled withdrawal.
Ammunition shortage
In a nearby town, Chasiv Yar, the terrifying power of the Russian attack is undeniable. Shops and houses are boarded up and the streets are deserted except for a few citizens with plastic shopping bags. During recent visits, deafening explosions were heard almost continuously as Ukrainian artillery fired on Russian positions in and around Bachmut and Russian guns returned fire.
Lena, a woman walking home Saturday afternoon with her groceries, ignored the explosions and barely looked at the unexploded rockets protruding from the tarmac. “My daughter left, but I stayed,” she says. “My home is here.” Others leave.
Early last week, rescuers from the Save Ukraine charity stormed in to evacuate some of the last residents in a particularly vulnerable neighborhood near the canal. They brought out a couple, Viktor (73) and Lyudmila (67). They had fled their home after a neighbor’s house was hit by a grenade. A second couple refused to go. The man said his wife had a stomach ache.
Ukrainian army units are scattered over the rolling hills that stretch for miles around Chasiv Yar and Bachmut. Artillery guns and tanks are positioned in the rows of trees and soldiers are scattered in the houses, their vehicles hidden under camouflage nets or behind buildings.
Occasionally Ukrainian jets fly above us, often in the morning, on their way to the front line. But this is primarily an artillery war.
“We repel fifteen to twenty attacks a day,” says Vladyslav, 26, commander of a self-propelled artillery battery six to eight kilometers from the outskirts of Bachmoet. “Today things are going more or less well,” he says cheerfully.
The rate of artillery fire is extremely high. “On average, we fire 80 to 120 shells a day,” says Vladyslav. “In a month and a half we fired more than 5,000 shells.”
But the artillery is running out of ammunition, a problem the senior commanders say explains the steady loss of ground. Mezhevikin: “There is a shortage. I would like more men, more vehicles, more ammunition to destroy the enemy on the access roads and his reserves, so that our people suffer fewer losses and do not have to fight so intensely.”
Units have had to learn to use their ammunition wisely, says Major Olexander Pantsyrny, commander of the Aidar assault battalion, a renowned combat unit. “We have to constantly plan and calculate our ammunition consumption.”
‘Kill box’
Due to these restrictions, Ukrainian combat units are struggling to cope with the advance of the Wagner group, the mercenary army leading the Russian offensive to take Bachmut. Wagner has bolstered his troops with thousands of convicts, but his core of professionals have proved capable fighters, several Ukrainian commanders who fought against them report.
“We realized they were a worthy opponent,” says Pantsyrny. “They have pretty solid combat experience, they have motivated personnel.” His battalion was sent to storm Wagner positions near the village of Kodema, south of Bachmoet.
“The enemy sent 20 men into the attack six to seven times a day,” said Olexander, a company commander who took part in the attack. In accordance with military protocol, he does not give his last name. “Imagine: twenty men come, we kill them. Another 20 men will come in five minutes, we’ll kill them. In an hour, another twenty. They don’t care about their men.”
After three weeks, the Russians surprised the battalions with a flank movement, breaking through a weaker unit from the side. The Aidar battalion was forced to withdraw.
A commander of another battalion, Dnipro 1, which fought Wagner units for months, says he found them more agile and enterprising than most Russian army units. The commander, who goes by the code name Duke, says Wagner used untrained prisoners in the first line of attack and then, after one or two hours, when the Ukrainian troops got tired, sent special forces into battle. They attacked from the flanks. “It was a very good tactic,” says Duke.
But Ukraine has been able to use Bachmoet as one kill box to grind up the huge numbers of newly mobilized Russian soldiers introduced to the battlefield late last year, he argues. Even Wagner’s troops would have been exhausted since the summer. “We broke their spines; we killed all their military staff,” says Pantsyrny.
According to him, there are only a few professional soldiers left. They would have to manage thousands of convicts who were recruited to fill the ranks, while the losses are noticeable: “They try something, but the results are not the same anymore.”
Russian troops have nevertheless advanced thanks to their greater numbers, bolstered by tens of thousands of new recruits and by sheer brute force. They sometimes demolished whole blocks to defeat a single sniper, according to a unit of soldiers.
But Russian losses, especially among Wagner men, are enormous, and the more confident Ukrainian commanders insist that the Russians have little strength left. “Russia is attacking on its last legs,” says Olexander.
However, the losses are also particularly heavy for the Ukrainians. For example, there is a shortage of volunteers at the front, says Duke. In November he received an urgent order “to collect all the people of our unit, cooks, drivers, press officer, photographer, all personnel, guns and go to the area around Bachmoet”. They had left by the end of February: 50 percent of the men were injured, some depressed and apathetic.
The number of Ukrainian wounded is not made public, but many units are showing increasing signs of strain from losses and exhaustion. “We are tired,” cried an army mechanic, Jaroslav, as he left a bar in a small town one night last week. “You must know the truth. They’re killing us.”
© The New York Times
