Last Stand In Bakhmut?
Though fighting across most of the front lines in Ukraine is relatively static, Russia is trying to grind out a Pyrrhic victory in one familiar spot.
The past week in the Ukraine War has been mostly more of the same as the last.
Russian attacks are down in most places, though the new tactic of launching 500kg glide bombs from deep inside Russian air space is becoming all too popular, the warheads 4-5x larger than the ones on Himars rockets and so capable of a lot more destruction. As the Russian city of Belgorod, across the border from Kharkiv, found out first hand when a Russian jet dropped a couple of them there by accident.
Ahead of its upcoming counteroffensives Ukraine has apparently been making probes along the front line in the south, including across the Dnipro river near Kherson. Drones have been active from Sevastopol to Moscow, though none have scored notable hits. Ukrainian troops continue to receive new armored vehicles and even a Patriot surface to air missile system, though kit in general is still coming slow, late, and in woefully insufficient quantities given how long the full-scale war has been underway.
Only in Bakhmut is Russia making any concerted effort to advance, apparently determined to score something it can claim as a victory despite the atrocious cost.
Ukrainian forces appear to have withdrawn to their last bastion in western Bakhmut and are fighting hard to maintain control of the two main access roads. Russia is reverting to the same tactics it used last spring in Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk: total urban annihilation. Teams push forward building by building and block by block, strikes by artillery and aircraft smashing any position Ukrainian troops might try to hold.
Here’s a screen grab from a video released by Ukraine’s 93rd mechanized brigade showing a drone’s eye view of what the town looks like now, as a Ukrainian tank shells an apartment building supposedly occupied by Wagner forces.
Now I haven’t done a lot of georeferencing work since grad school and my evaluation may be completely off here, but a cursory look at Google Earth leads me to think that this is where the fight happened:
It’s hard to appreciate from afar just how devastating modern war is. After a while one moonscape starts to look like every other, making it hard to see what a place looked like before it got blown up.
Fortunately, historic imagery on Google Earth is available. The nearest shot of this part of Bakhmut is from a few blocks down the avenue that has served as the front line in the sector for a couple now.
After watching videos of what Russia did to urban areas in Syria and seeing images of American “precision” bombardments of places like Fallujah and Raqqa over the past twenty years, I thought I was pretty jaded. But witnessing the footage coming from the front lines in Ukraine has been a reminder that as bad as you think war can be, it’s always somehow even worse.
Far from holding the line to the last man, as some portrayals of the Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut seem to imply Kyiv has been doing, Ukraine has instead been slowly retreating to a kind of citadel at the western edge of Bakhmut made up of a cluster of high rise buildings constructed on a slope overlooking the rest of the town.
The critical suburbs of Ivanivske and Khromove anchor this effective bastion, and so long as they remain under Ukrainian control supplies can flow into the Bakhmut citadel. Over the past week Wagner and Russian airborne forces have again been fighting to cut the highways coming into the area from Chasiv Yar, probably aware that if these towers and the bunkers between them can get supplies the cost of taking the area will be extreme.
On the southern flank of Bakhmut Russian forces have been fighting uphill for weeks and making almost no progress. On the northern flank, near Khromove, a Russian attack managed to reach the highway leading into Bakhmut before being thrown back by a counterattack. Here the fighting is absolutely brutal, the landscape transformed into a modern-day vision of the Western Front from the First World War, lacking only the routine poison gas attacks.
Some absolutely incredible first-hand footage has emerged of one of the bitter close quarters fights Ukrainian troops are having to endure, and though I link to it here (Youtube original) as well as here (Twitter, re-post) I have to put this warning in bold:
This is real combat footage, and people die.
I only post the full links because I took some screenshots to illustrate the boots on the ground lived reality of soldiers in this war and feel strongly about giving credit to sources. But unless you have actually been a soldier with a combat specialty there is little you can truly glean from watching this that images won’t get across just as well. Sound is another story, of course but you can play a video in the background to hear the cacophony of modern war without witnessing its grim results.
Anyone watching the video who hasn’t crawled in the mud with a rifle training to survive in this horrific environment has to remember that they aren’t feeling everything these soldiers are. This makes all the difference because these dudes are running on pure adrenaline honed by discipline, something you just can’t replicate in civilian life - even training isn’t quite the real thing.
All that being said, I also firmly believe that Ukraine’s defenders deserve to have their stories told, raw and unvarnished.
For the first time in history people having to endure the true misery of war can show everyone else what it’s truly like. This testimonial-level information is the ultimate counter to the myths and lies spouted by people who glorify war. Now there are no excuses in this regard - only willful ignorance.
Witnessing the awful work soldiers have to do is the only way to truly understand how vital it is to make wars like these impossible to wage. Pretty much the only reason humanity didn’t nuke itself into oblivion during the Cold War, aside from pure dumb luck, was the fact that most leaders in the USA and Soviet Union had experienced the Second World War and understood the stakes.
History shows that it is only experience with the inherent brutality of warfare that teaches people to avoid it at all costs - unless, as is the case in the Ukraine War - the fight is absolutely necessary, a matter of survival. That’s why it is so important that the stories of ordinary soldiers are told.
The video shows a feed from a helmet camera carried by a soldier moving to a bunker dug into a tree line that has been worked over by artillery. The soldier enters the bunker to discover a group of comrades waiting for their next fight, the body of one of their own - a guy who went by the nickname “Norman” - lying partially covered near the entrance.
A short while after, an explosion literally just outside the bunker rings everyone’s bell, knocking over a guy who had been digging near the entrance. The feed shifts to a different camera, apparently belonging to the leader of the Ukrainian team assigned to this section of the front lines. A radio call has come in, warning of Russian soldiers - Orcs, as they call them - entering the trench line outside.
The rest of the video is of him fighting while working to coordinate the defense against a Russian assault team. Again, fair warning: it’s intense.
The fighting outside the bunker begins with a Russian soldier spotting the Ukrainians and throwing a grenade at them. It only gets heavier from there.
Anyone who has seen real combat is probably at real risk of some post traumatic stress watching a video like this - I’ve only ever trained for it, almost twenty years ago now, and even I can still feel like I’m there in the sense that old training kicks in to evaluate what I should be doing if I was.
Would, of course, is another matter. For the record, the Ukrainian commander on the spot here is literally 42,000% braver than I would ever be in the same situation. Not only does he expose himself to hostile fire numerous times, he’s actually taking aimed shots and not just spraying and praying.
That’s a veteran soldier right there - reminds me of the sergeants who trained me. Here’s a still of him covering his dudes as they deal with this wave of Russians trying to break into their trench network. At least one Russian fatality is visible in this image, giving a sense of just how close quarters this fighting is.
The Russian troops come at the Ukrainian position from two sides, forcing the units’ leader to get up and move to cover the other flank while directing his troops. Note that this team has no heavy weapons at all, just M-4s, Kalashnikovs, grenades, and a light machine gun or two.
Also note how ridiculously hard it is to see anything from the ground - most of the time during this video I can’t even tell what the Ukrainian soldiers are shooting at. Half their shots are meant to keep the enemy soldiers’ heads down and nothing more, with the Russians mostly taking casualties when they try to move - as they have to, being the attackers, thus illustrating the power of being the defender in an engagement.
Long story short: the Ukrainians win this encounter without taking any more casualties. Once the last Russians stop fighting back, apparently being all dead, Russian artillery starts to strike all over the area, sending Ukrainian troops rushing back to their bunker. Immediately they go through the post firefight ritual of resupplying on ammo and reporting their status to headquarters.
Imagine this ten thousand times over and you have the story of the front lines in Ukraine over the past six months. Soldiering is a job like any other, it has its tools and tricks and rhythms and patterns that define the life for anyone in it.
It has been the daily, even hourly sacrifices by men and women like these that have prevented Ukraine from falling under Putin’s boot over these past fourteen months more than any other factor.
In the English speaking world pundits and experts talk about the Ukraine War as if it is some abstract thing, a board game where the only thing that really matters is the score at the end.
Talking heads and the politicians they’re trying to curry favor with hold sterile debates about the dangers of escalation and risk of having too few weapons in inventory to take on China, but the hard truth is that they are utterly disconnected from the people bleeding and dying every day to defend Ukraine.
Ukraine has been holding off Putin’s onslaught for over a year, longer than anyone, myself included, ever imagined possible. In that time, though, Kyiv has had to fight tooth and nail at every stage to get the weapons and supplies it needs to do more than hold its own, creating a situation where a ceasefire leaves Russia holding more Ukrainian land than ever before.
American leaders inhabit a social reality where their role forces them to act like they know and are in control of everything in the world even when this is manifestly impossible - unless they can get away with disclaiming responsibility altogether, as most ultimately did during the Covid pandemic once the response became politically charged. This systemic evasion of natural democratic accountability is a big part of why the USA makes the same mistakes over and over again, generation after generation.
The stubborn refusal to supply Ukraine with fighter jets, to cite the most pertinent example, is entirely a function of the Biden administration creating arbitrary red lines early in the conflict. It needed to look as if the US was avoiding escalation with Russia even as it supplied ever more lethal aid to kill Russian soldiers. Not allowing the conflict to turn into World War Three has been the administration’s stated core policy, which sounds good in principle but paradoxically creates the exact conditions required to bring such a horror about.
Half-measures don’t cut it in war, and NATO is, unfortunately, effectively at war with Russia. The only thing preventing a direct conflict is both sides’ awareness that neither could hope to win one. Yet despite conventional belief, one incident or even brief exchange of missiles does not automatically mean all-out war has begun, and pretending otherwise is a bluff made by politicians who want to avoid difficult discussions about the consequences of their policy choices.
The Biden administration’s self-deterrence, as some have taken to calling it, represents a kind of self-centered political virtue signaling with no positive benefit for Ukraine or NATO. It represents an abnegation of responsibility, a determined effort to avoid making hard and politically dangerous decisions. In a perverse way, it’s a perfect mirror of Putin’s own strategy now that his army has so miserably failed.
Putin has made it abundantly clear that he believes Ukraine’s supporters will lose interest if the war drags on. Elites in Russia that Putin depends on remaining silent see the Biden Administration’s fear of anything resembling open war with NATO as evidence the US secretly wants a ceasefire. An impartial observer could be forgiven for coming to the same conclusion. Recently a couple established and well connected scholars of international relations writing in Foreign Affairs argued that there is basically no way Ukraine can liberate all of its territories and that a ceasefire this year is both inevitable and the best possible outcome because of the risk of nuclear war.
The logical end result of this dynamic is escalation because Putin has strong incentives to make the fight existential in order to bolster his argument that it truly is, a feedback look that will continue until the nukes come out. The longer the war goes on, the deeper Russia is sucked into and defined by it, the lower the odds Putin or a future Russian leader can end it without the nuclear showdown Washington desperately fears.
Which means that Biden’s hesitation ultimately leads not to a ceasefire, but even more and worse conflict in the future.
The fact that those Pentagon briefing documents allegedly leaked by a National Guard IT specialist were not noticed by the FBI despite beginning - as has now been revealed - almost as soon as the war started in 2022 indicates either extreme incompetence on the part of the Pentagon or - and this appears to be how Russia views the situation - a signal from the Biden administration that it wants a ceasefire in place before the 2024 elections.
The damage that perceived American double-dealing like this does to the USA’s relationships with South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the rest of NATO cannot be overstated. Quite frankly it stands to reason that, if China were to surround Taiwan with warships and announced a permanent maritime quarantine stopping all weapons-related imports, the Biden administration would make a big public show of force and levy sanctions while quietly telling Taipei to make a deal.
Reputation matters in the international system. The basic trouble with American foreign policy thinking is that remains rooted in scientific paradigms that should have died when the Cold War. American scholars and policymakers alike fail to treat the international system as one, so can’t understand it or react effectively when facing a systemic crisis.
Meanwhile, back down on the ground in Ukraine, people who deserve better are bleeding and dying in mud just like their great-grandparents had to. Reinforcements are coming, but in less than half the strength Ukraine deserves.
It bears pointing out that had Ukraine’s allies moved on the logistics and training infrastructure a year ago Ukraine’s skies could already be filled with every jet aircraft model known to NATO. This would make ground operations so much easier, making all the difference in the lives of soldiers like the ones holding ground along Bakhmut’s lifelines. Lack of these are now being cited by wise minds, in some rather astonishing hypocrisy, as reasons not to give Ukraine jet jets now.
Catch-22 was written about the United States armed forces for a reason.
In any case, this operation will end, but in a soldier’s life there’s always another. Be nice if they had some proper air support on their next deployment. I guarantee that more would come home to their families alive.
The evidence, as far as I see it, is now clear: Ukrainians are literally dying today because thinkers and planners and leaders across the NATO countries failed to either deter Russia’s attack last year or intervene with enough support to end it in a decisive defeat at any moment since.
Ukraine never asked NATO to join the fight directly, but thousands of armored vehicles remain in US depots around the world. Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most notorious dictatorships, is fully equipped with top of the line Abrams tanks and F-15 fighter jets while Ukraine goes without.
At some point you have to assume that these choices are by design. One that leaves Ukrainian lives and all the money sent to support the country so far in jeopardy while DC props up useful dictatorships elsewhere.
This is one of those policy choices that will define the international system for years to come. And too many people who shouldn’t have to will pay the ultimate price.
Because everything is part of an interconnected system, and systems are very real. Just as Putin will pay the price for having people used as cannon fodder, so will Biden, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Trudeau, and all the rest when the truth of how mediocre their response to Russia’s aggression has been seeps into the minds of the general public.
Small wonder that so many people are losing faith in democratic government.
The irony is that Ukraine might just do better when it strikes this summer than anyone expects. No army can throw away soldiers like Russia is clearly doing without paying a price.
If Ukraine’s attack surrounds large bodies of Russian soldiers and they start to run out of supplies, there is a possibility that major components of the Russian military system will collapse.
The one key advantage of going on the attack is that you gain the ability to impose a new landscape on your opponent. And if the Russian army can barely manage to gain ground despite throwing gobs of firepower and bodies into the maelstrom, how does its officers think it will perform during counterattacks after Ukraine breaches Russian defense lines?
Starting a month or so from now, the world will find out.
Do share on whatever social media you use or email if you know anyone interested in systems-based, non-partisan analysis of the Ukraine War.