With Ukraine under pressure in Bakhmut, fight becomes a battle over roads
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Ukrainian soldiers at an artillery position near Bakhmut on March 3, 2023.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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KYIV, Ukraine - Ukrainian forces repelled multiple Russian attacks on Saturday in fighting around Bakhmut, which has come down to a metre-by-metre battle for vital roads that supply the city’s defenders.
But the Ukrainian military acknowledged that soldiers inside the city were encircled on three sides by a combined force of the Russian army and the Wagner private military company, which includes fighters recruited from prisons.
In a video, Wagner’s owner, Mr Yevgeny Prigozhin, on Friday taunted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying that only one road remained open to the west of Bakhmut, a city in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian commanders say that a counterattack this past week pushed Russian forces away from at least one of the embattled roads, for the moment easing resupply for troops in the city.
In any case, the seven-month battle for Bakhmut – Russia’s longest-running sustained assault since the invasion last year – is being decided by seesaw fighting around the rural roads, which cut through rolling, grassy hills and small villages to the west of the city.
One of the roads heads west to the town of Chasiv Yar. The other, which was more open after the Ukrainian counterattack, leads south-west to the town of Ivanivske. Ukraine has fallback positions in the hills along both routes.
Much is at stake. Although military analysts say it is unlikely that Russia could steamroll deeper into Ukrainian territory if it captured Bakhmut, the city’s fall would hand Russian President Vladimir Putin a symbolic prize as the first major city taken by his forces since July.
The Ukrainian military said in its morning battlefield assessment on Saturday that Russia had continued its efforts to encircle the city over the past 24 hours.
Britain’s military intelligence agency said Saturday that two key bridges had been blown up.
For Russia, capturing Bakhmut would open the roads to the west – but not by much. Ukraine has multiple layers of defences in the Donbas region, sometimes seen in long trenches cut through fields to the rear of the current front line. So if Russia does ultimately claim Bakhmut, the gruelling war of attrition could simply shift a few kilometres to the west. NYTIMES
