Although they are advancing slowly, the Russian troops are gaining ground step by step in the long battle for Bakhmut. The head of Wagner’s mercenaries, the oligarch Yevgueni Prigozhin, who maintains that it is his fighters who bear the brunt of the Russian offensive, assured yesterday that they already control the eastern part of the city. The Ukrainians, who are willing to inflict the greatest number of casualties on the enemy even if they end up retreating, are holding out for now. Even when? Maybe not much. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did not rule out that this stronghold would fall in the coming days.
“Everything east of the Bakhmutka River is fully under Wagner’s control,” the founder and head of the mercenary group said on Telegram. This river divides the city in two. The urban center is to the west.
In Russia they continue to call Bakhmut by the name he had until 2016, Artiomovosk. Controlling this point in Donetsk province could be a huge moral victory, especially after seven months of fighting in one of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.
On March 6, Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, said that Bakhmut has more symbolic importance than strategic value, a view also shared by many experts. “The fall of Bakhmut will not necessarily mean that the Russians are going to turn the tide of the conflict,” he said.
But according to Moscow, breaking through the Ukrainian defenses at this point may allow them to continue advancing. “This city is an important defense center for Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region. Capturing it will allow us to continue advancing and entering the defense lines of the Ukrainian armed forces,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said a day earlier.
The Russians “understand that they cannot make rapid advances, so they have only one tactic: advance where they can. If they see that there is any success in a place, then they throw all their reserves there”, explained Serhí Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, on Ukrainian television.
A week ago, Kyiv’s strategy seemed to call for a controlled tactical withdrawal. But after a meeting on Tuesday between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and army chiefs, it was decided to strengthen the defenses and hold positions to inflict as many casualties as possible on the enemy.
In a meeting with defense ministers of the European Union, held in Stockholm (Sweden), Jens Stoltenberg assured that Russia was sending more troops to battle. And although he stressed that “it has suffered many casualties,” he noted that “we cannot rule out that Bakhmut will eventually fall in the coming days.”
According to the NATO Secretary General, the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from this stronghold will not mark a turning point in the conflict. Still, he appealed not to underestimate Russia. “We must continue to send support to Ukraine,” he said.
Bajmut is practically in ruins. Before the start of the conflict, it had a population of just over 70,000 inhabitants. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk has said that there are still 4,000 civilians, including 38 children, living in the city.
Last weekend, the oligarch Prigozhin again showed his confrontation with the Russian military high command, which he accused of delaying the shipment of ammunition for its fighters. Without them, he warned, the Russian offensive positions could collapse if the mercenaries withdrew.
Ukraine also needs ammunition to maintain the defense and mount a counteroffensive. In Stockholm, his defense minister, Olexí Reznikov, called on EU members to support Estonia’s plan for the joint purchase this year of one million 155-millimeter shells for Ukraine at a cost of 4 billion euros.
