Bloody Battle in the East
Ukrainians fend off another wave of attacks on Bakhmut
3/3/2023, 8:28 p.m
The Battle of Bakhmut may be nearing its end. Apparently the Russians are advancing further and are on the verge of being surrounded. But the Ukrainians are still resisting, as the General Staff is now reporting.
Russian troops have continued their assault on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. “The enemy is still trying to encircle the city,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in its daily situation report. A series of attacks on various focal points around Bakhmut were repelled by the Ukrainian defenders.
The Russian military has been trying to capture the city for months. The head of the Russian Wagner mercenary force deployed there, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his fighters had almost completely encircled the city. “There’s only one road left (out),” he claimed in a video message. The information could not be independently verified. The city, which once had 74,000 inhabitants, is now largely destroyed. According to estimates by the authorities, around 5,000 civilians still live in Bakhmut.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian side insists that the city will continue to be defended. On Thursday alone, the Ukrainian military said it had repelled more than 85 attacks in the five main sectors of the front, the general staff said in the morning. “Yes, it’s difficult and tough, but we know how to proceed,” Secretary of the Security Council Oleksiy Danilov told the RBK-Ukraina portal. A Ukrainian reconnaissance unit that works with drones has been ordered to withdraw, according to its commander.
As high as possible losses of the Russians
In an interview with the “Bild” newspaper, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Resnikov did not rule out that Bakhmut could fall to the Russians. But that would only mean “they win a small victory,” he said. After losing the cities of Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk in 2022, Bakhmut is part of Ukraine’s next line of defense in Donbass. With the trench warfare, the Ukrainian army has forced Russia to suffer the highest possible losses of soldiers and material.
The Ukrainian leadership has said that Bakhmut in the Donetsk region has limited strategic value, but wants to prevent Russian advances. Russia, on the other hand, hopes that capturing Bakhmut will be an important step towards conquering the rest of the surrounding Donbass industrial area, which consists of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“What’s in it for you?”
There are different assessments of the strategic importance of Bakhmut. Former high-ranking US generals Ben Hodges and Stephen Twitty told ntv.de that a breakthrough would have few consequences. Hodges justified this by saying that the Russians did not have enough troops to advance. Twitty said, “Even if Bakhmut falls to the Russians, what would they gain? They would not have achieved a strategic goal.”
On the other hand, political scientist Carlo Masala warned on ntv that the Russians could advance 80 kilometers should Bachmut fall. German Brigadier General Christian Freuding said last week: “But the city also has a purely tactical importance. If you look at the road connections, you can see that the loss of Bakhmut and the county road further west would mean that supplies to the Ukrainian troops would become much more difficult,” says Freuding. “The Ukrainian troops would have to give up terrain at a depth of up to 30 kilometers.”