![]() 'Forbidden to retreat'īut both sides have described the battle for Bakhmut as the bloodiest of the war. Neither Ukraine nor Moscow has given death tolls. ![]() Everyone came to fight," he said.īut, he added, "when there is no fire support and when there are no armoured vehicles, we are simply shot, like in a shooting range." The bodies of five of his fighters could not be retrieved from the battlefield. Major Volodymyr Leonov of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces said in three days in January he had dozens wounded. Ukrainian servicemen of the State Border Guard Service at a position in Bakhmut © YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP Moscow and the notorious Wagner mercenary group have been accused of using ill-prepared and poorly equipped recruits as "cannon fodder" - a claim Russian military analyst Alexander Khramtchikhine dismissed as "Western propaganda". "We shoot, and shoot and shoot, but after five minutes, the next 20 people are coming towards us," he said. Russia's strength in numbers is also daunting, said a sergeant near Soledar with the call sign "Alkor". "You can sit in a basement in the village of Vasyukivka (north of Bakhmut) for half an hour and hear 40 incoming shells." ![]() "The enemy has a huge advantage in artillery," Yuriy Kryzhberskyi, a 37-year-old Ukrainian officer, told AFP near the front in late January. The lack of firepower on the front is keenly felt. "If this does not happen, then we will have serious problems in Bakhmut," he told AFP. "We will fight as long as we can" for Bakhmut, he said.īut to keep Russia at bay, Ukraine's forces also need more standard artillery and ammunition, said Oleksandr Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military analyst. "If weapon (deliveries) are accelerated - namely long-range weapons - we will not only not withdraw from Bakhmut, we will begin to de-occupy Donbas," he told senior EU leaders in Kyiv earlier this month, referring to the wider region, including Donetsk. "If that's where the Russians are attacking, the Ukrainians don't have a choice but to defend."īritish intelligence has estimated Russia's progress to be halting, but that hasn't eased pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has called for more weapons from Western partners. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is gifted a Ukrainian flag bearing soldiers' signatures during a visit to the frontline town of Bakhmut © STRINGER / UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE/AFP "It has a lot of symbolism, so if they captured Bakhmut, they'd make it sound like it was important, but it wouldn't be."īut, he conceded, Ukraine's options are limited. When Moscow's first attempt to encircle Ukrainian forces failed, Russia "kept attacking", he said.Īnd even if they do succeed, he added, "it will mean nothing operationally and strategically". "It's a classic World War I problem," said Mark Cancian, a senior security programme adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Moscow has ramped up efforts to score its first significant victory after months of setbacks, while Kyiv is determined to hold its ground. Yet even as the dead and wounded are rushed out or abandoned on the battlefield, both sides are digging in and flinging more troops at Bakhmut to break the deadlock. Victory over the city, pounded to ruin, would be merely symbolic as the anniversary of the invasion looms on February 24. Like the 1916 fight on the western front in France, the battle for Bakhmut, now in its seventh month, has been long, bloody and futile. "It's like Verdun out there," said Ivan, an ambulance driver waiting on a roadside outside the battered industrial city in the eastern Donetsk region. Men with limbs lost to mines and artillery wounds are pulled from battlefields carved with trenches and scarred by shells in a fight drawing comparisons to infamous battles of World War I.
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