Inside battle of Bakhmut, where troops are dying by the thousand

The fight for the town in the eastern Donetsk region has been described as Ukraine’s Stalingrad.

Ukrainian servicemen man a trench near Bakhmut on Saturday. Picture: AFP

At Ukraine’s military academies they still teach the doctrines of Georgy Zhukov, the celebrated Soviet general whose victory at Stalingrad reversed the fortunes of the Second World War.

But they are taught about him as an example of what not to do. Given the focus of the present war in Europe, the battle of Bakhmut, is being described as Ukraine’s Stalingrad, that is a gamble of which the academies’ recruits are only too aware.

“We are taught many ways of how not to fight,” said Second Lieutenant Roman, 23, freshly commissioned into the Ukrainian army’s 80th brigade. “We aren’t taught so many ways of how we are supposed to do it.” A hundred metres away, a 40-year-old howitzer was shelling an ammunition warehouse behind Russian lines.

In Bakhmut, the Ukrainian infantry have taken up positions in the city’s rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, retreating only when Russian artillery destroys them. To the outsider, the result looks very much like Stalingrad, albeit on a smaller scale.

Roman’s commanding officer brought up a video on his phone of the results of one of his unit’s artillery barrages: the white dots littering the muddy field captured by a drone were Russian bodies, pock-marking a patch of no man’s land. Ukrainians are also dying by the thousand.

The human wave tactics Zhukov pioneered – sending men to charge German buildings suicidally, with a second squad of men behind to shoot anyone who turned and fled – are also being used by Russia today, especially the Wagner mercenaries who have led the attack on Bakhmut. “These men are cannon fodder, just like Zhukov’s,” Roman said. “They are doing the same now as he did then.”

The battle for Stalingrad lasted 200 days. The battle for Bakhmut, a fraction of the size, has lasted longer. The Russians first attacked in May, though they only really turned their attention to the town after capturing the bigger prize of Severodonetsk, 65km north, in July.

Lieutenant Vyacheslav, right, commander of a howitzer unit, insists Ukraine’s tactics in defence of Bakhmut are working

Bakhmut controls an important highway to the last two big cities in the Donbas still in Ukrainian hands, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. But the strategic value of Bakhmut is far outweighed by its symbolic value to both sides. Battles are easier to start than finish.

If all of Russia’s numerical superiority cannot be victorious in a town of 70,000 people, what hope does it have of neutralising the whole of Ukraine, a giant when measured against any European country save Russia itself?

But if Ukraine cannot hold on to it, after pouring men into its defence for eight months, among them its most hardened officers, how can it hope to march over Russian defences to the sea in a counterattack, and free the territory it lost in Russia’s invasion last year? Standard reckoning is that the attacking force takes three or more times as many casualties as the defending one, and that goes for Ukrainians as well as Russians.

Slavik, a wiry veteran with the 21st brigade, looked raw, red-faced and with bloodshot eyes as he came back from the frontline on the city’s southern edges.

“There’s a lot of direct contact,” he said. “In the city, it’s building by building.” He claimed the kill ratio of the two sides was seven to one in Ukraine’s favour.

The Russians have forced a way across the river that dissects it and reached close to the town square. Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin filmed himself last Monday raising a flag on what he said was the city hall. Western observers fear Ukraine has lost some of its best officers defending Bakhmut. While Russia has sacrificed 20,000-30,000 men, many if not most have been Wagner’s released convicts.

Lieutenant Vyacheslav, the howitzer unit’s commander, insisted that wearing down the enemy and preventing it from moving into the villages west of Bakhmut was a good tactic as well as a public relations decision. “If we withdrew from Bakhmut it would be very hard to take it back,” he said. “Meanwhile, our tactics are exhausting the Russians.”

Zhukov’s troops were Soviet, and included hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, as well as Russians. If Bakhmut can hold out for President Volodymyr Zelensky, it will be a rallying point of huge emotional value both to his people and his international backers. There is a general assumption among Ukraine’s Western military advisers that few armies can defeat Moscow in a war of attrition. Bakhmut is the latest test of that theory.

THE TIMES