Ukrainian Counterattacks At Bakhmut Stem Russian Advance

The Ukrainians have evidently decided it is worth staying in Bakhmut a while longer as there are more Russians to kill. JL 

Carlotta Gall reports in the New York Times:

Early Saturday, Ukrainian assault brigades went on the attack. Over the weekend, hundreds of troops joined the counteroffensive, mounting assaults from the ground and pounding Russian positions with artillery from the surrounding hills. The fighting over the weekend showed that a military that has surprised the world with its doggedness was not yet ready to give up on Bakhmut. That preserved both a supply line that has helped Ukrainian soldiers tie down the Russian offensive for months and an exit route for them should they decide to retreat.

Lined up in the dark in civilian vehicles, lights dimmed, a company of soldiers waited silently at the side of a road. Farther behind, a second company was parked, an occasional light inside a car revealing the face of a soldier. Still farther back, a third company was moving into place.

After months of epic struggle, the fight over the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut had seemed in recent days to be reaching a climax, with Russian forces close to encircling the city and some Ukrainian units pulling out.

Then, early Saturday, Ukrainian assault brigades went on the attack. Over the weekend, hundreds of troops joined the counteroffensive, mounting assaults from the ground and pounding Russian positions with artillery from the surrounding hills.

Ukrainian commanders acknowledged that their forces in Bakhmut still faced the risk of encirclement, but the fighting over the weekend showed that a military that has surprised the world with its doggedness was not yet ready to give up on Bakhmut. How holding the city might fit in with its broader plans was less clear. Even before Ukraine stepped up its attack on Russians in Bakhmut on the weekend, its forces had moved to beat Russian troops back from the last main highway into the city. That preserved both a supply line that has helped Ukrainian soldiers tie down the Russian offensive for months and an exit route for them should they decide to retreat. “I’m confident Bakhmut will hold,” said Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, commander of a combined tactical group fighting in Bakhmut. “We have enough forces to throw the enemy back from this city, but it depends on the tasks the command has, be it holding the city, or inflicting maximum losses on the enemy.”

Soldiers on the ground expressed weariness, but they did not seem ready to give up.

Bakhmut itself, a city with a prewar population of 70,000 inhabitants, has little strategic value. It was simply the next in the line of fire of a Russian offensive to seize the eastern province of Donetsk. But the battle for the city has created a defining moment of the war for both the Russian and the Ukrainian armies. No longer is the fight about Bakhmut: It is a marathon contest to see which army can break the other.

Russia has thrown tens of thousands of newly mobilized troops into a huge ground assault to take the city by sheer force of fire and manpower. Ukraine has used every hard-learned tactic from a year of war to hold ground and inflict maximum casualties on the invader, often battling from house to house in neighborhoods of smashed houses and stunted trees.

Ukrainian troops have steadily lost ground, ceding outlying villages and suburbs in recent weeks. And late winter has been particularly punishing. Weeks of freezing temperatures and now the onset of the mud season have sapped their strength, soldiers said.

“The fog is constant — every night we see almost nothing,” the commander of a combat drone unit attached to the 59th Brigade, who goes by the code name Madyar, said in a video message from the front.

“The temperature is above zero for a third day,” he added. “Everything melted. Mud up to the knee. Rain 10 times a day. Makes it difficult to perform tactical tasks.”

Late last week, Madyar said his unit was pulling out. Other units have, as well. It remains unclear if the movements were part of a rotation or of a controlled withdrawal.

In one nearby town, Chasiv Yar, the terrifying power of the Russian assault is unmistakable. Shops and homes are boarded up and the streets are deserted save for a few civilians carrying plastic shopping bags. Earsplitting explosions sounded almost constantly on recent visits as Ukrainian artillery fired on Russian positions in and around Bakhmut and Russian guns returned fire.

One woman, Lena, walking home with her shopping on Saturday afternoon, ignored the explosions and barely glanced at unexploded rockets sticking out of the asphalt.

“My daughter left but I stayed,” she said.

“It’s home,” she said in explanation.

Others are getting out.

Early one morning last week, rescue workers from the charity Save Ukraine raced in to evacuate some of the last residents in a particularly exposed neighborhood near the canal. They brought out one couple Viktor, 73, and Lyudmila, 67, who had fled their home after the neighbor’s house was hit by a shell. A second couple declined to go. His wife was ailing with stomach pain, the husband said. Ukrainian Army units are spread out across the undulating hills that stretch for miles around Chasiv Yar and Bakhmut. Artillery guns and tanks are ranged in the tree lines, and soldiers are dispersed in private houses, their vehicles hidden under camouflage nets or behind buildings.

Overhead, Ukrainian jets fly occasionally, often heading in the morning on sorties toward the front line. But this is predominantly an artillery war.

“We repel 15 to 20 attacks a day,” said Vladyslav, 26, commander of a self-propelled artillery battery positioned four or five miles from the outskirts of Bakhmut. “Today it is going more or less fine,” he said cheerfully.

The tempo of artillery fire has been extraordinary.

“On average we fire 80 to 120 shells a day,” Vladyslav said. “In one and a half months we fired more than 5,000 shells.”

But artillery ammunition is running low — a problem senior commanders say helps explain their steady loss of ground.

“There is a shortage,” Colonel Mezhevikin said. “I would like more people, more vehicles, more ammunition to destroy the enemy on the approaches, and his reserves, so our people would have fewer losses and not have such intense fighting.”

Units have had to learn to be judicious with their ammunition, said Maj. Oleksandr Pantsyrny, commander of the Aidar assault battalion, a renowned fighting unit. “It’s constant planning, calculation of ammunition consumption.” Those restrictions have Ukrainian combat units struggling to stem the advances of the Wagner group, the private military company that has been leading the Russian offensive to take Bakhmut.

Wagner has bolstered its numbers with thousands of convicts, but its core professionals have proved able fighters, several Ukrainian commanders who fought them said.

“We realized they were a worthy adversary,” Major Pantsyrny said. “They have pretty good combat experience; they have motivated personnel.”

His battalion was sent to storm Wagner positions at the village of Kodema, south of Bakhmut.

“The enemy would send 20 guys into attack six to seven times a day,” said Oleksandr, a company commander who took part in the assault. He did not give his surname in accordance with military protocol. “Imagine: Twenty guys come, we kill them. In five minutes, 20 more guys come, we kill them. In an hour, 20 more. They don’t care about men.”

Then after three weeks, the Russians surprised the battalions with a flanking movement, breaking through a weaker unit from the side. The Aidar battalion was forced to retreat.

A commander from another battalion, Dnipro 1, which spent months pitted against Wagner units, said he found them more agile and enterprising than most Russian Army units.

The commander, who uses the code name Duke, said Wagner used untrained prisoners in the first line of attack and then, after one or two hours, as the Ukrainian troops were tiring, sent special forces into the fray, attacking from the flanks. “It was very good tactics,” Duke said.

The Kill Box

But Ukraine has been able to use Bakhmut as a kill box to grind down the vast numbers of newly mobilized Russian soldiers who were introduced to the battlefield late last year, he said. Even Wagner’s forces are said to have been worn down since the summer.

“We broke their backbone; we killed all their military staff,” Major Pantsyrny said.

He said that only a few professional soldiers seemed to be left to direct thousands of convicts who had been recruited to fill the ranks, and that the losses showed: “They try something, but the results are not the same anymore.”

Russian troops have, nevertheless, been advancing, thanks to their greater numbers, bolstered by tens of thousands of raw recruits and through sheer brute force. They sometimes demolish whole residential blocks to defeat a single sniper, according to one unit of soldiers.

But Russian casualties, especially among Wagner, have been enormous, and the more confident Ukrainian commanders insist that the Russians have little fight left. “Russia is attacking on its last legs,” said Oleksandr, the company commander.

Ukrainian casualties have been relentless, too, and there is a shortage of volunteers in places on the front lines, Duke said. In November, he was given an urgent order “to gather all the people of our unit, cooks, drivers, press officer, photographer, all staff, take rifles and go to the Bakhmut area.”

By the end of February, they had rotated out with 50 percent of the men wounded, he said, some depressed and apathetic.

Ukrainian casualty numbers are not publicly available but there are growing signs of strain from losses and exhaustion among many units.

“We are tired,” exclaimed an army mechanic, Yaroslav, as he exited a bar in a small town one evening last week. “You need to know the truth. They are killing us.”