The Second Battle Of Bakhmut: A Loser's Guide
The Second Battle Of Bakhmut: A Loser's Guide
Timing is everything
A new Russian offensive has begun in the east of Ukraine. On the flanks of Bakhmut, Russian paratroopers attack behind a curtain of artillery fire. Progress is still slow and costly, but the attacks are better-planned and executed than the human wave assaults of December and January, so there are fewer of them.
This will change. Ukrainians expect Russian attacks in Luhansk and the Donbas in the week to come. Assaults on Ivanivske this week are preparatory to an attempted breakthrough between Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar, a vital fortified base of supply to the east. Using the naming convention established by the First World War, to which the present conflict is constantly compared, this campaign should be called the Second Battle of Bakhmut.
Wagner PMC incurred 80 percent casualties to its prisoner formations just to inch forward trying to encircle Bakhmut. Unsurprisingly, the current recruiting drive in Russia’s prisons is reportedly raising only one-third the number of volunteers. Observers suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, so visible in the drive on Bakhmut before the new year, has diminished accordingly at the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, the Russian Army has rebuilt some shattered formations and turned out new ones. Of the 300,000 draftees in last September’s mobilization, half were sent into battle immediately as cannon fodder, while the other half were trained to the standards of a regular conscript. Sergei Shoigu, the Minister of Defense who suffered so much public humiliation from Prigozhin in 2022, has risen accordingly in the Kremlin, according to observers.
A loser’s guide to the next battle for Bakhmut must therefore begin in Moscow, where command and control are hardly unified, and military matters are decided by the peculiar insecurities of Vladimir Putin. No one else is allowed to have the centralized command, let alone the competence, to fix what has gone wrong in Ukraine. The best they can do is throw more men and equipment into the fire, hoping it will be enough.
Ukraine has been held back by a warm winter, but this cloud has a silver lining. Western nations, especially Europe, have benefitted from an uncommonly mild season that nullified the loss of Russian fossil fuel supplies. They are now more willing to provide aid than before.
Shoigu and Putin know this. Clearly, they hope to finish conquering the Donbas and Luhansk before Leopard tanks and other weapons arrive in large numbers. To that end, they will sacrifice tens of thosuands of Russian lives.
For the warm weather continues. Temperatures are expected to hover right around freezing throughout February, with the daytime high above zero Celsius and nighttime lows below zero. Add the rain and snow expected to make the coming days gray and cloudy, and the result will not be frozen ground, but a mix of wet and frozen, the worst possible combination for both troops and tanks.
Ukraine is famous for bezdorizhzhia (бездоріжжя), or “roadlessness,” their equivalent to the Russian word rasputitsa (распу́тица) for the mud season of spring. It came early last year, arriving in March to play a role in Russia’s early defeats around Kyiv and Cherniv. “General Mud” will be early again this February and Russians will march right into it.
On Telegram, Igor Girkin predicts that “the battle will continue on our side until victory or until complete exhaustion of forces” in Bakhmut. Girkin has been indicted for war crimes, but his pessimistic predictions have largely been correct.
Now he says that Bakhmut must fall within “several days to the end of the month,” otherwise the operation will culminate in failure.
Bakhmut may yet fall. Ukraine routinely surrenders ground as slowly as possible, inflicting maximum casualties in the process. Moreover, Ukrainians are nowhere near as attached to Bakhmut as Putin seems to be. For them, the ruined city is just a good place to kill Russians. Like Severodonetsk, the loss would be sad, but not world-ending for Ukraine.
Every new wedge that Russian troops drive into the Ukrainian “line of control” by piling up as corpses becomes a new fire sack, surrounded on three sides by enemy artillery, to sprout new corpses. Ukraine can afford high casualties in this “meat grinder” as long as the ratio is acceptable, and Russians keep finding new ways to achieve that goal.
It is a race to see who can lose the least combat power.
“The waves can unnerve the new guys,” a Ukrainian commander tells one reporter. “They destroy the first one and then more keep coming; they start to think it will never end. The experienced guys just swap their rifle for a machine gun and it’s all good!”
The same principle scales up. All that concentrated Russian force is going to draw fire from long-range systems like howitzers and HIMARS. Ukrainian air sorties are trending upwards as well.
It is impossible for Ukraine to stop Russia from advancing at all during February — indeed, it will probably be a month of grim news — but they appear to be increasing their own operations commensurate with the threat.
As always, Russian propaganda is already triumphal. Expect lots of victory pronouncements between now and March. Every acre of ground that looks like the scene above will get reported as a massive success, an actual breakthrough, a stepping stone on the way to victory. Putin may even take Bakhmut and then declare victory, “offer” a cease-fire, and hope the west divides over supporting Ukraine to the bitter end.
For Ukraine, the challenge is to outlast Russian efforts and resume the offensive once Russian manpower has been reduced again. Russian forces cannot be strong everywhere at once along such a long line of contact, inviting a Ukrainian counteroffensive wherever they weaken as combat power saps away.
This was the very problem which led to the breakthrough in Kharkiv last September and then Putin’s belated resort to mobilization. Rumor has it that, if this wave of conscription fails, he will just double down again, and raise another 500,000 Russians. He could do that, though he might have to arm many of them with T-34s and bolt-action rifles. For Putin, losing over and over again is preferable to admitting defeat. It doesn’t matter to him what kit the condemned carry.
Ukraine is equally unlikely to accept defeat. Society shows no sign of weakening morale and their leaders remain cautiously optimistic for 2023. With the west finally coming around to share sufficient numbers of tanks and other weapons for retaking lost territory, they have good reason to be.
But first, they have to weather the storm of steel as best they can.