Ukraine says Bakhmut battle pins down Russia’s best units
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Ukraine said its air defences shot down many drones and missiles, but had no way to stop Russia's hypersonic cruise missiles.
PHOTO: AFP
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KYIV – Ukraine has decided to fight on in the ruined city of Bakhmut, because the battle there is pinning down Russia’s best units and degrading them ahead of a planned Ukrainian spring counter-offensive, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The comments by Mr Mykhailo Podolyak were the latest signal of a shift by Kyiv this week to continue the defence of the small eastern city. It is the site of the war’s bloodiest battle, as Moscow tries to secure its first victory in more than six months.
“Russia has changed tactics,” Mr Podolyak said in an interview published by Italy’s La Stampa newspaper. “It has converged on Bakhmut with a large part of its trained military personnel, the remnants of its professional army, and the private companies.”
He added: “We, therefore, have two objectives: to reduce their capable personnel as much as possible and to fix them in a few key wearisome battles, to disrupt their offensive and concentrate our resources elsewhere, for the spring counter-offensive. So, today Bakhmut is completely effective, even exceeding its key tasks.”
Russia has made Bakhmut the main target of a winter offensive
Kyiv had seemed at the start of March to be planning to withdraw to positions west of the city. But it announced at the start of this week that its generals had decided to reinforce its troops in Bakhmut and fight on.
In a morning update, the Ukrainian general staff reported a large number of attacks along the front and said “the enemy is not halting its attacks on Bakhmut”.
Moscow says capturing Bakhmut would be a step towards taking all of Ukraine’s Donbas industrial region, a major goal.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday, seizing the city would punch a hole in Ukrainian defences and let Moscow advance deeper.
The intense trench warfare, described by both sides as a meat grinder, has led to huge losses.
But Kyiv’s decision to stay and fight rather than withdraw, was a sign it believes Russia’s losses are far worse than its own.
Moscow short of missiles?
After making gains throughout the second half of 2022, Ukrainian forces have been mostly on the defensive since mid-November, while Russia has gone on the attack with troops called up in the country’s first mobilisation since World War II.
But apart from around Bakhmut, the Russian winter offensive has largely failed.
Meanwhile, Kyiv is awaiting a surge in Western military aid expected in the coming months for an offensive once muddy ground dries in late spring.
Kyiv and the West also saw signs of exhaustion in Russia’s latest mass salvo of missile strikes on Ukrainian targets.
Russia fired hundreds of millions of dollars worth of missiles
The barrage killed civilians, including a family buried under rubble while they slept in their homes near Lviv, 700km from the battlefield.
The missile attack also cut electricity supplies in several cities. But there was relief that the risk of a catastrophic meltdown at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was averted as power was restored after a temporary disconnection from the Ukrainian grid.
Otherwise the attack appeared to have achieved little.
The worst damage appears to have been in the eastern city of Kharkiv, where the regional governor said around 500,000 people were still without power on Friday morning.
It had been three weeks since the last similar Russian attack, the longest lull since such strikes began in October.
Previously, Moscow had been unleashing such attacks roughly every week, challenging Ukraine’s ability to repair infrastructure before the next onslaught.
Separately, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Friday that the reason for the longer lull was probably that Moscow was running out of missiles and had to wait between barrages for its factories to produce them.
“The interval between waves of strikes is probably growing because Russia now needs to stockpile a critical mass of newly produced missiles directly from industry before it can resource a strike big enough to credibly overwhelm Ukrainian air defences,” it said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it carried out Thursday’s “massive retaliatory strike” as payback for a cross-border raid last week
Moscow says such hits are intended to reduce Ukraine’s ability to fight.
Kyiv says the air strikes have no military purpose and aim to harm and intimidate civilians, a war crime.
‘Clash of empires’
Expressing a readiness to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin to call for peace, Pope Francis said in an interview published on Friday that the war in Ukraine was fuelled by “imperial interests, not just of the Russian Empire, but of empires from elsewhere”.
The White House said the missile barrage was “devastating” to see, and Washington would continue to provide Ukraine with air defence capabilities.
Damaged vehicles where missile parts fell onto a residential parking lot in the Sviatoshynskyi district of Kyiv, March 9, 2023.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
The missile attacks briefly knocked out power to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, severing it from the grid and forcing it onto emergency diesel power to prevent a meltdown.
It was later reconnected to Ukraine’s energy grid, operator Ukrenergo said.
The plant, which Russia has held since capturing it early in the war, is near the front line and both sides have warned in the past of a potential for disaster.
Moscow said it was safe.
United Nations nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi appealed for a protection zone around the plant.
“Each time we are rolling a dice. And if we allow this to continue time after time, then one day our luck will run out,” Mr Grossi told the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors. REUTERS
