Is The Defense Of Bakhmut A Mistake?
The real reasons Western analysts are criticizing Ukraine's fight for Fortress Bakhmut.
Make no mistake: being a soldier on the ground in Bakhmut is just about the worst fate anyone could possibly imagine.
Truth be told, no one who hasn’t fought alongside Bakhmut’s defenders these past months can truly understand the costs of this miserable grinding fight.
Not even the few journalists and academics who travel there to see what conditions are like for themselves.
Now, I encourage anyone who wants to truly understand war to witness it as best as they can. It’s the only way to build up a righteous hatred of the enterprise that might, gods willing, allow humanity to get the monster under control.
Besides, we owe at least that much to the people bleeding and dying on the front lines. This is not some mere brushfire war, but part of a grand global cataclysm that is going to keep getting worse, especially if and when the US winds up in an open fight with China it is not prepared to win.
For now, soldiers in Bakhmut are being asked to make the blood sacrifice asked of too many people throughout history.
Meanwhile, military analysts in the English-speaking world have spent the past two months essentially shaming Ukraine into withdrawing from the ruined town.
The European arm of Politico published a piece today that sums up their arguments quite nicely. This article is also notable for including comments from almost every one of the analyst-pundits who dominate media interviews, people like Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, David Petraeus, Mick Ryan, and a few other media-designated authorities on military matters.
Most, though not all, insist or imply that Zelensky has committed to fighting for Bakhmut for purely political reasons. They believe Ukraine should have pulled back weeks ago to save its troops, who are being forced to endure horrific conditions.
Here’s what you need to know about these think-tank employed pseudo-scholars:
None have any experience with the kind of warfare being waged in Ukraine outside of training, which lags reality.
Their claims of scientific authority are easily shattered if tested using modern methods, particularly ones derived from systems theory.
They are not on Ukraine’s side, but NATO’s - and there is a difference.
English-speaking defense analysts voluntarily participate in what NATO manuals term information war. The goal of it is to shape perceptions of a conflict to keep civilians at home on-side, and they are willing to drive a wedge between Ukraine’s leadership and its troops on the ground if it serves their interests.
Under the assumption that the other side is always doing the same thing, no matter how ineptly, NATO governments officials work closely with scholars to publish allegedly authoritative evaluations intended to be picked up by journalists. Government officials then get to cite news interviews with these scholars as evidence supporting actions they prefer to take, or not take, as it goes.
The refusal to create even a partial no-fly zone across parts of Ukraine offers a perfect demonstration of this system at work. Ukraine asked for it to help protect civilians from Russian air strikes early in the war, but public experts in NATO countries immediately ruled it out, alleging that this would immediately open direct hostilities between NATO and Russia that could only spiral into a Third World War.
Anyone who questioned their logic was immediately tagged as a warmonger who didn’t understand the situation. This despite the fact that making this assumption aids Russia, creating space for Putin to operate he might not have been able to secure himself.
Now, it is important to make something clear: this system doesn’t operate based on conspiracy, and nobody sat down and decided on a grand master plan to deceive anyone.
But the kind of people who become big names widely cited in the news are generally part of the same social circle, broadly speaking. They hold titles and credentials awarded by processes that outsiders have no say in, and anyone who pushes too hard against the conventional wisdom created by their separate efforts is cast out of the club.
The real issue here is that only a narrow set of views ever get heard. And many of the experts became that way by more or less reciting a canon created by their predecessors that was never tested in the real world.
This is why in the days leading up to Putin’s assault on Kyiv, they were almost unanimous in their belief that Ukraine was doomed.
There was no true evidence for this view, and when tested, the hypothesis failed. Ukraine resisted, contrary to the expectations of leaders in Russia and NATO, in the process creating an entirely new reality.
It is essential to realize that there are not just two sides in the Russia-Ukraine war, but five.
You’ve obviously got Russia, which has effectively turned into a malign cancer fated to destroy itself in the near future. Then there’s naturally Ukraine, a sovereign country since 1991 whose borders have been ruthlessly ignored by Moscow. NATO, though allied with Ukraine, clearly maintains Kyiv in a separate, lesser category of partnership than formal NATO members.
China meanwhile is aligned with Russia but not willing to openly support it, concerned that if Russia falls it will be isolated by a US-led NATO and become a perpetual tinderbox threatening China’s ability to trade with Europe. And finally there is the post-colonial world, the re-developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia. All they really want is for the war to not impact food and fuel supplies, and most are vaguely hostile to NATO because it contains their former colonizers.
But this complexity is anathema to American political leaders, who have a cultural need to reduce everything to a good against evil showdown.
Complexity also eludes them when understanding the dynamics of the battlefield, in large part because nearly all Western scientific philosophy depends on reducing everything to a linear equation. One of the critical flaws in all of what people call Western military science is a total blindness to the holes generated by certain ideological attachments to the way military leaders prefer their institutions be structured.
To put that in more tangible terms, during my brief military service drill and ceremony was still technically a part of the basic training curriculum. Recruits were supposed to spend hours learning how to march in formation and look pretty in parades.
Our drill sergeants, though, all fresh back from Iraq, completely ignored these rules. Instead, nearly every waking moment was spent in counterinsurgency mode, new recruits trained to be suspicious of literally anything in the environment that might hide a bomb or sniper.
War looks very different from the ground level than it does in a distant capitol, or even a general’s headquarters.
The way the officer corps works in the standard Western military model is likewise not a function of rational military science, but a culture that depends on maintaining certain traditions to survive in its present form. This is a natural social habit that makes any institution fragile and mighty vulnerable if and when it is put to the test.
Most American military experts you see cited in the news are not offering truly scientific assessments, but distillations of facts into a prepackaged form that fits the way they prefer to describe war.
To admit that Ukraine might just understand modern combat better than any American is taboo. This runs right up against the subtle authoritarian impulse in English-speaking countries that needs people from any other place to be lesser in some vital way.
In point of fact, the United States military would likely have failed in Ukraine just as badly as Russia’s had it tried to march on Kyiv in some alternate universe. Sure, in Baghdad twenty years ago the US succeeded in changing Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime - but what happened after?
Nothing good. Like Putin in Ukraine, the US would have been better off just cutting and running the moment things turned sour. But its leaders couldn’t, because that would shatter the illusion of American power forever and expose them to criticism, so thousands of regular people died.
In the end, America’s claim to superpower status was shattered anyway. Putin’s road to this war in Ukraine ultimately begins in the wake of the American misadventure in Iraq that began twenty years ago this week.
A few of the analysts you see in the media offering up proclamations about the conflict in Ukraine today were doing the same exact thing during the Iraq War.
The hard truth of the matter is that the United States was prepared to give up Ukraine in February of 2022.
Americans were being prepared for the fall of Kyiv to avoid a repeat of the fall of Kabul, which if you look closely at its arguments the Biden Administration clearly does not believe went as poorly as it in fact did. Looking surprised by events is death for an American President, and the steady release of declassified intelligence information was almost certainly intended to give the US cover for failing to protect a country is kept calling a partner and even ally.
It remains an open question to what degree US actions inadvertently encouraged Putin to attack when he did and in the way he did. The hysterical response to the Capitol Riot, meeting with Putin after he built up an attack force on Ukraine’s borders in 2021, the debacle in Kabul, and then NATO allies sending Ukraine only small arms mostly useful in an insurgency - a conspiracy theorist could almost be forgiven for believing that Biden was openly signaling to Putin that the only cost for going to war would be sanctions and another round of NATO expansion.
Likewise, the constant foot dragging when it comes to giving Ukraine modern military gear and scaling up training for new soldiers over the past year has signaled to Putin that NATO is absolutely aiming to freeze the conflict and lock in Russian gains to avoid further - read nuclear - escalation.
The ongoing information war by NATO leaders waged by these think-tank types is extremely detrimental to Ukraine’s interests. Frankly, I have to suspect that they are clearing the way for blaming Ukraine’s leaders if its counteroffensives later this year fail as a prelude to cutting support as the US elections approach. Ukraine continues to be given inadequate levels of support if its partners actually want to see Russia lose, and now the analyst class is beginning to paint a portrait of the leadership in Kyiv not truly caring about its troops.
There is clear overt intent behind this narrative. The habit of thinking of Ukraine as lesser than Americans or Western Europeans allows leaders in these countries to rule out any support they fear might make Putin go nuclear, which they equate to the end of the world.
This only encourages him to actually go there in the end, as Putin quite clearly believes that NATO will ultimately back down if pushed to the edge.
The downing of a US drone over the Black Sea - closer to Romania than Crimea, if reports are accurate - is likely part of Putin’s grand strategy.
Evidence is mounting that Russia really is husbanding its resources not for a risky grand offensive, as I’ve feared for months, but to be able to gnaw away at Ukraine indefinitely. Moscow appears to be calculating that one or two thousand casualties a day drawn from poor rural regions is sustainable.
For Putin personally, a forever war in Ukraine suits him just fine. He’s like the player in a grand strategy video game who gets tired of building up his forces and decides to give the wargaming engine a try.
Failing to appreciate just how much war consumes everything once it begins, now Putin is locked into his course of action, back to the wall, and this may have been his real personal objective all along.
To force Russia into an apocalyptic struggle he knows most never wanted, all for the glory of Tsar Vlad.
George W. Bush once took America to war in Iraq for similarly vainglorious reasons. Power is power, and the powerful always squander what they’ve got in the end, because they’re human beings like everyone else.
So, to circle back to Bakhmut: I’ve laid all this out in hopes that it helps anyone who reads it understand the way public perceptions about Ukraine are being actively shaped by a class of entrepreneurs who are looking out for their interests more than Ukraine’s.
NATO may be happy to see Ukraine winning for now, but NATO leaders know they aren’t ready for an all-out conflict with Russia and need to wrap up the fighting before it gets out of control.
Putin, on the other hand, has no reason not to continue to escalate the conflict according to his own internal logic. If he loses in Ukraine he’s likely deposed and dead anyway, so he has no reason not to embrace forever war.
The horrible fighting Ukrainian forces are having to endure in Bakhmut is an awful and inevitable sacrifice made less by Ukraine’s leaders, and more by Ukraine’s fair-weather friends abroad.
I’ve been asking myself for weeks if I would make the same decision as Zelensky and keep pouring resources into the place. Doing so goes against the mobile style of warfare I was trained in and prefer.
But part of war is making your enemy react to your moves. And Russia retains the initiative in this regard because of its larger stores of manpower and ammunition.
The hard truth is that abandoning Bakhmut now is not likely to save any Ukrainian lives in the end. The best case that can be made for giving the place up is that the loss ratio might be more favorable to Ukraine elsewhere.
But then again, it might not.
The scholars pressing this case for bailing on Bakhmut are using a limited set of interviews conducted with soldiers from a subset of the units fighting in and around Bakhmut.
One of the eternal truths of war is that conditions vary - every soldier’s experience is unique. This makes proper scientific research extremely difficult, and not something one can do in a couple weeks of field work.
Statistical analysis of a dataset is always affected by the scope of the population sampled. So when analysts say that Ukraine is suffering as high of losses as Russia in Bakhmut, it is important they specify what scale level and location they’re referring to.
Inside Bakhmut proper, where Ukrainian troops are stuck in house to house fighting, battling for the ruins street by street, casualty rates are going to be much higher than those further south, where Ukrainian units hold high ground that overlooks fields. But you can’t easily separate the two parts of the front in an analytical sense, because on a battlefield military formations occupy space, and this imposes limits on the movements others can make,
To surround a fortified position requires many, many more troops than is needed to defend it. And as the attacker makes the attempt, it effectively extends the surface area of its front, creating weak points defenders can hit with local counterattacks.
Pulling back from Bakhmut would spare the brigades inside, but once Russia’s effective front line length is reduced, this will free up forces that can attack in other places. Ukraine also gets troops to redeploy elsewhere, but fewer than Russia, because surrounding a place takes more troops than holding it.
Leaders, no matter how much they care about the people under their command, are always sending them out with the full knowledge that some won’t return intact.
Every person killed on either side is a hole ripped from somebody’s world, a family member or friend gone forever.
But because the soldiers stuck on the front lines have no choice but fight if they want to survive - something especially true of Russian forces - they are force to inflict this harm on other human beings even if they don’t really want to.
This means that winning a fight always entails losing some of your own people. The ratio varies depending on the situation, but in the conflict so far Ukraine has shown that even in the best case scenarios Ukraine loses one soldier for every ten Russians.
Ukraine is likely far better at medical evacuations than Russia, whose leaders would prefer casualties simply disappear rather than be counted, but a casualty is still a casualty: war is a monster ever hungry for more flesh. And here some awful math comes into play.
Russia has around 350,000 soldiers in occupied Ukraine, and apparently another 150,000 or so still training in Russia, according to a recent Washington Post piece. To render Russia’s formations combat ineffective requires turning around a quarter of its troops into casualties - another 125,000 or so over the next 60-120 days, plus an additional 50,000-75,000 over the summer given that Russia continues to mobilize new blood.
The grim math implies that Ukraine faces the loss of at least 10,000-20,000 more soldiers before Russia finally runs out of steam. At typical fatality rates, this means Ukraine is going to lose thousands more lives in the absolute best case scenario.
For Zelensky and his armed forces, the key question is where this blood sacrifice can best be paid to end the suffering as soon as possible. These are the kinds of grim, inhuman calculations total war forces people to make.
If open-source intelligence reports are correct, Ukraine has 4-5 brigades with around 20,000 troops in the city of Bakhmut itself. These are likely taking such high casualties that none will be able to fight after they are forced to withdraw at last or rotated off the line.
But there are another 5 or so brigades fighting the Russian attempt to encircle Bakhmut from the south, and 5 more taking on the pincer in the north. Here Russian forces are having to throw themselves into Ukrainian guns in terrain where Ukrainian forces are giving ground, then counterattacking in what remains a fluid situation.
Ukraine has not scored any decisive victory on either flank, but the longer Russian forces push here, the more damaged their front line units will get. And if Ukraine does pull out from Bakhmut, what happens next?
Russia pushes on to Chasiv Yar in the south and Sloviansk in the north. This would probably force the defensive lines around Siversk to crumble, aiding the Russian advance towards Lyman.
And then Ukraine is faced with the exact same problem: pay a steep cost in blood, or pull back further, which lets Russia consolidate ground it can later defend at lower cost than it took to seize it from Ukraine.
On a battlefield, everything is connected. Pulling out of Bakhmut would not trigger a general Ukrainian collapse, but it would accelerate the degradation of other brigades, making it harder for them to inflict casualties on Russian spearheads that are inherently more vulnerable than troops operating along a coherent linear front.
And Ukraine, while not sending fodder to the front lines like Russia, has to preserve the brigades capable of mounting an offensive to the degree it can. Those in Bakhmut are not among Ukraine’s most effective, predominantly light infantry without a lot of tanks or other heavy gear.
I am not saying that Bakhmut should be held at all costs, or that sacrificing brigades is ideal.
But the facts on the ground do not support the case being made by Western military pundits that Ukraine is making a major error in fighting so hard for it.
What these pundits are doing is engaging in a flavor of negging in the service of Western political leaders. They are trying to leverage the natural fear Ukraine has of being abandoned, suggesting that maybe Ukraine isn’t using the resources donated by its allies as effectively as it should.
This narrative is all about covering Western politicians - who fund and promote these think tanks - if and when they ultimately choose to pull back from supporting Ukraine.
Despite constant proclamations of unyielding support, the fatal flaw in Western countries as allies is that they have a secret ranking system governing how far they’ll actually go for a foreign partner in a fight.
This is the basic idea behind the English-speaking countries of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing pact, the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, having a closer relationship with each other than anyone else. Latent in Anglo-Saxon culture is a very real assumption that we are the special ones, and so our lives are more valuable.
Britain, for example, attacked its former French ally in 1940 after the Vichy Regime concluded a separate peace with Nazi Germany. Fearing what might happen if the French fleet wound up in German hands - though this was not truly a threat - Churchill ordered an operation that killed hundreds of French military personnel.
This is the poison pill at the heart of NATO, and why I am absolutely convinced that Europe must build its own defense force - a case at the heart of a piece I wrote for Euro Prospects this past month.
And it is also why you have to take arguments made by Western military analysts with a healthy dose of salt and vinegar.
The truth is that only history will reveal precisely how important the fight for Bakhmut really was.
But based on the best available information, Ukraine’s stubborn defense of the place does make sense.
That may change soon. But right now, fortress Bakhmut continues to stand, inflicting immense pain on the Russian army. The sacrifices made by its defenders really are paving the way for a Ukrainian counteroffensive this summer that stands a real chance of breaking Putin forever.
Was this nightmare ideal for anyone? No.
But if you have to blame someone, blame the leaders of the United States and NATO for not arming Ukraine more fully and much sooner.
More than a year ago the need was already clear. They didn’t move fast enough, and gave Putin time to catch his breath.
So the war drags on, and people continue to die who didn’t have to.