Bakhmut Still Stands

Russian forces are on the verge of an historic defeat

A most improbable Ukrainian victory may be near. After eight months of relentless bombing, artillery barrages and waves of infantry assaults, Russia’s attempt to take the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has stalled. The failed assault has likely cost the Russian army 30,000 casualties, including 9,000 killed in battle, according to Western officials.

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash

While it is still possible that Russian forces can take the city, The New York Times reports on March 30 that Ukrainian commanders in Bakhmut are “quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it.”

“The enemy exhausted all its reserves,” the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday…The Russian assaults have slowed and the imminent threat of encirclement has been thwarted. “The density of assaults dropped by several times,” he said. “Before, they could assault in all directions simultaneously and in groups of not less than 20, 30 or 40 people, but gradually it is dying down.”

The Times reports that army leaders believe that Ukrainian forces can hold the city and push Russian troops back farther. “If the Ukrainians hold their recent gains, the battles of the last month at Bakhmut could prove a turning point in Ukraine’s defense against Russia, not only stalling the latest Russian offensive but also in setting themselves up to deliver a knockout blow.”

Ukrainian troops are training for an anticipated counter-offensive in April or May, using new weapons finally arriving from the United States and other NATO nations, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, ammunition and even Soviet-era jet fighters.

The failure to take Bakhmut would be an astonishing defeat for a Russian army that Russian President Vladimir Putin believed would conquer all of Ukraine in days. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told the Senate this week that Russia is “suffering an enormous amount of casualties in the Bakhmut area.” It is a “slaughter-fest,” he said. The Russian army looks fragile and it is possible that a Ukrainian offensive could break through, at least in parts of the Donbas region, pushing the invading force back to Russia’s borders.

War Mapper @War_Mapper

A close-up map of the approximate situation around the city of Bakhmut. There have been no confirmed changes to control since the last update.

Russian commanders are worried. Bloomberg News reports that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group, is preparing to scale back his private army’s operations in Ukraine and shift focus to the profitable business of providing his mercenaries to African leaders. Prigozhin had planned to use the capture of Bakhmut as proof of the superiority of his leadership over Russian generals. Those ambitions now lie smoldering on the battlefield. Putin, meanwhile, has ordered the conscription of 147,000 new recruits after his army has suffered casualties of at least that number over the year of war.   

While recognizing the losses the Ukrainian army has suffered and the many tough months of war ahead, Ukrainian President Zelensky is sober but confident of victory.

Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa

400 days of our defense against 🇷🇺 full-scale aggression. This is a colossal path that we've endured. All together, everyone who has fought & keeps fighting for 🇺🇦. Who has cared & continues to care for 🇺🇦. Who has strengthened & keeps strengthening our resilience. 🇺🇦 will win.

Zelensky’s view squares with the assessment of retired General Mark Hertling who in his article “Why Ukraine Will Win the War,” explains why it is a mistake to look at the current phase of the war as a stalemate. Rather, Ukraine is struggling to survive the Russian onslaught. And they are doing so. They are defeating what many believed would be a powerful Russian winter offensive. It has turned out to be deadly, but more anemic and much less effective than feared.

“It’s a delicate balance for the decision-makers in Kyiv,” he writes. “They are trying to hold the defensive lines while training and equipping their forces with newly obtained, advanced Western materiel that will make a qualitative difference in the looming counteroffensive.” His bottom line? Throughout every phase of the war “Ukraine’s forces have significantly outperformed Russia’s, in no small part because of a military culture of adaptability.” He believes Ukraine will prevail because “Russian forces continue to be hampered by a lack of that very same culture, as well as by a lack of leadership and initiative.”

Finally, Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson reminded us in her daily Substack newsletter on March 30 that Vladimir Putin had hoped to annex all of Ukraine without a fight during the Trump administration - and that Donald Trump’s efforts to deny any link to Russia is what began his years-long campaign of lies and denunciations of journalistic, legislative and judicial attempts to hold him to account.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has given a new frame to Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. A piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times Magazine in November 2022 pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs. Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”

In exchange for weakening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scale to help Trump win the White House.

Rutenberg notes that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like a way to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016 but, thanks to a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Russian president Vladimir Putin expected.

Putin seems to believe that he can outlast the Ukrainians on the battlefield, wage a disinformation campaign to weaken Western public support for Ukraine, and hold on until he can help elect a different US president.

One problem: the Ukrainians are not cooperating. They may well defeat Putin’s invasion before Western quislings can help him realize his hubristic fantasy.