The head of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said Monday that Russian forces control 75% of the Donestk city of Bakhmut and that fighting was still raging.
“I can say with certainty right now that our forces control over 75% of the city,” DPR head Denis Pushilin said on Russian TV, according to the Russian news agency TASS. Pushilin said it was too early to say that Russia controlled all of Bakhmut and said there was fierce fighting in the western districts of the city.
Also on Monday, Ukrainian military leaders reported heavy Russian attacks. Gem. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said Kyiv’s defense of the city would continue, calling the situation “difficult but controllable.”
Syrskyi also accused Russia of using “scorched earth” tactics in Bakhmut by destroying buildings and Ukrainian positions. Pushilin made a similar accusation of the Ukrainian side, saying Ukrainian forces were destroying areas it retreated from.
“When the enemy is forced to retreat under our onslaught of our forces, it also seeks to inflict maximum damage. The city administration building was blown up with a rather large amount of explosives,” Pushulin said.
Russian and Ukrainian forces have been battling for the city since August 2022. Russia began making slow but significant gains in January, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is determined to keep defending the city. Zelensky recently told AP that he fears if he loses Bakhmut, he will be pressured to “compromise” with Russia.
Due to the heavy casualty rate, Bakhmut has become known as the “meat grinder.” Ukrainians fighting on the front lines have told the media that soldiers are being sent into battle with very little training, support, and ammunition.
Do those poor under-trained Ukrainian soldiers really “need” a bunch of ammunition instead of “very little”?
Don’t embarrass your Russian army like that. They think they are fighting a well trained and equipped Ukrainian militia.
If they’ve been fighting poor under-trained Ukrainian soldiers since last February and had barely made any significant progress, what would that do the their already low morale?
Lol!
Those leaked documents with the phoney casualty numbers of 5 to 1 just caused us to share Boris is killing 2 for 1 of theirs instead of the fake 5 to 1 numbers.
That really does not look good for your Nazi battalions.
Where do you get your news from?
A very short list:
Amwaymedia
Le Monde
Labor Notes
Mail.ru
Responsible Statecraft
Telesurenglish
E-International relations
Benwar news
China labor watch
ZNet
Silk Road briefing
Glenn Greenwald
+ more
I’m confused, those sites don’t regurgitate the crazy pro Russian information you post here
You finally shared something I can agree with; you are confused.
All you need to know about Bakhmut is that after eight months of intensive assaults the Russians are still unable to complete the encirclement of the Ukrainian garrison.
Have you never heard of slow-walking? The Russians are making steady progress. So long as their own casualty rate remains low, they don’t need to move in a hurry.
The Russians already have fire control over the roads leading in to Bakhmut. If they so chose, they could completely isolate the Ukrainian force there.
Ask yourself why they don’t. This is a war of attrition.
‘So long as their own casualty rate remains low’
Thanks for the laugh.
All the evidence suggests that the Russians are minimizing their own casualties. They do not use “human wave” tactics, but, rather (as detailed battle maps show over and over again), they attempt to flank and then encircle the urban strongpoints that the Ukies have made into fortresses. In addition, the Russians use stand-off weapons, like artillery, in which they clearly have the advantage, against the dug-in Ukie infantry. First, they “soften” up the defenses, with arty, missiles, mortars, bombs, and rockets. Then, small squads of attacking Russians probe the flanks. If they succeed, they advance, and then launch further flanking attacks off the gained ground. Eventually leading to operational, if not total, encirclements. If the small scale attacks fail, the Russians go back to pounding the area with stand-off weapons. Then they attack again, with small groups. On the flanks. (NOT with mass frontal assualts.) Rinse and Repeat. That’s how the Russians are fighting. That’s how they took Mariupol, the twin cities, and Solidar, and that is the same set of tactics that they are now using in Bakhmut, Adeevka, and elsewhere on the line.
Given all that, it seems like wish casting, to me, for the Ukies and their sponsors to continue to claim enormous losses for the Russians, without any kind of detailed breakdown, without accounting for the facts I laid out above.
You can laugh all you want, but it rings hollow unless you can refute that.
You just described Russian scorched earth tactics, a very primitive type of warfare that has zero regard for civilians and the environment.
I also enjoyed your personal account of the situation on the ground. An attempt to spin the story into a fantasy.
Tell that to the Kremlin supporters here, they’ll believe that BS.
The civilians are mostly gone from Bakhmut.
The Russians are advancing slowly, because the Ukies have dug in in the city buildings and made fortresses out of them. Every city along the way, this has been the case, the same story. Artillery, followed by flanking, followed by partial encirclment, followed by Ukie retreat, with the Russians “winning” the smashed city. The buildings are being destroyed in the fighting. No one even disputes that this is what is happening. No matter the label you put on it.
Not even sure where you are coming from, in your knee jerk contrariness and combativeness.
Again, this is the BS coming from the Kremlin. I can’t argue with this crap.
Mostly, it is coming from Ukranian sources, NATO sources, and neutral sources. This is just how the war is going. It is not a partisan presentation. Much less is it “BS.”
You can’t “argue” with it, because it is obviously the truth. And, the odd thing is, it is not particularly a “knock” on the Ukraine. It has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the war generally, nor even with the conduct of the war in terms of right and wrong.
Rather, it is just an accurate acount of the strategies used by each side. And, at that, it recognizes that the Ukrainians have been using an effective strategy. Defense of urban areas, turning cities towns and even villages, into fortresses, is at least as old as the Battle of Stalingrad, and has been used by outgunned forces in the decades since, including in Vietnam by the NVA and the Viet Minh (the Battle of Hue) and in the Middle East (by Hezbullah and others). The Ukrainians have used it well, with the solid old Soviet-built masonary apartment blocs, factories, and administrative buildings (often complete with bomb shelters and tunnel systems) serving as very effective fortresses.
In turn, rather than beat their heads against the wall in frontal assualts, the Russians have used late WWI tactics of taking small “bites” out of the Ukie defensive positions, working constantly to flank and encircle them, and wearing them down with arty and the like.
Regard for the environment and civilians in that area of the world during a war?
You have to be kidding but we all know you actually are serious.
Thanks for the laugh at your expense……
Say that kind of stuff around here and you’re bound to be disliked, but it’s the truth. People act like this war of attrition of the Russians was their first idea – it wasn’t. Putin tried to get a lightning war in Kiev, found out the Ukrainians put up more resistance than he anticipated, and now they’ve become bogged down in a dumb war and have pivoted to play the long game to save face. (seems like mobilization is an issue to me – Wagner took Bakhmut, a small PMC, not the standard army)
Oh yeah, I’m an arm chair general, blah blah. You’re right. But the favorite MacGregor has been saying Russia will take Odessa for like, a year now, and I have yet to see one blue and white striped shirt there.
Well, you will definitely get a few dislikes here but not from me though.
He’s repeating State Department propoganda so obviously you agree with it.
Anything Biden or his puppeteers say at State you believe.
I believed Putin when he said he would not invade Ukraine and that it was all a Western Hyped propaganda. Guess where that landed me.
Need I mention the other 100 to your face lies by Putin and his corrupted team?
I will take Western information over the Kremlin’s any day cause at least I can question it without being afraid of retaliation by our governments.
In otherwords you believe the western media and politicians and what they told you Putin had shared and the exact meaning and context of those words.
Guess what, they are also lying about his plans to roll over the whole of Europe before he heads here.
Zelensky recently admitted the heavy casualties might lead to “compromise” in dealing with Russia. Seems like a lot of deaths to get back to where you were before the vast majority of deaths had occurred.
Aren’t we allying these guys? Ukraine?….
maybe under the table allies but not WW2 style allies where US fought side by side with the other allies. right now uncle sam is acting as “bullet store proprietors”.
as soon as US fighting boots are on the ground over there will be a real problem.
Hopefully Zelensky will authorize a surrender. If this thing plays out the hard way, Ukraine will lose an estimated 15,000 troops. This week, the Russian air force has demonstrated what could happen to the areas of Bakhmut that Ukraine still holds.
He’ll just “draft” (grab) more recruits off of the streets.
The penalties for resisting the draft have been greatly increased but I have not heard if they are charging widows for the bullet that their husband took while he resisted the grab/draft.
Unfortunately, you might be right. Zelensky doesn’t seem to care much about how many Ukrainian soldiers are killed. The only thing that seems to matter to him is territory.
Perhaps money is involved too?
From today’s Seymour Hersh Substack:
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/trading-with-the-enemy
The Bakhmut/Artemivsk”Meat Grinder” is just that. A way to conduct a war of attrition. Russia is not looking for vast territorial gains merely depletion of the Ukrainian army.
A war of attrition failed for the Japanese in the mid 1940s, but was successful for the North Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s against America.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor has given figures approaching America’s KIA in World War 2. Worst case Ukraine is approaching over 300,000 KIA. In the “Meat Grinder” of Bakhmut/Artemivsk the kill ratio is 10 Ukrainians for each Russian KIA!
Average life expectancy for a raw conscript on the front line in Bakhmut/Artemivsk is 4 hours!
In Bakhmut/Artemivsk life is “Nasty, Brutish and Short”!
Ukraine admits to ‘horrible losses’ in war against Russia; Refuses to reveal number of casualties
Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s envoy to the U.K, made a big statement about “real” war casualties. In an interview to U.K based daily express said that “Ukraine will reveal the horrible losses of its soldiers once the war with Russia is over. He added that it is Kyiv’s policy to not discuss our losses amid ongoing war. Watch this video for more
https://eurasiantimes.com/ukraine-400000-killed-millions-displaced-lowest-birth-rate/
“Syrskyi also accused Russia of using ‘scorched earth’ tactics in Bakhmut by destroying buildings and Ukrainian positions. Pushilin made a similar accusation of the Ukrainian side, saying Ukrainian forces were destroying areas it retreated from.
“’When the enemy is forced to retreat under our onslaught of our forces, it also seeks to inflict maximum damage. The city administration building was blown up with a rather large amount of explosives,’ Pushulin said.”
The difference, of course, is that “scorched earth” tactics are those usually used by the defending-retreating force, not the advancing force. This is just basic terminology and common sense. Russia has declared that Bakhmut (and the rest of the four oblasts) are now Russia proper. They have no intention of retreating once they take a city (and, when they do retreat, as in Kherson, they did NOT defend the city as a fortress, and did not blow it up, either), and would obviously prefer to take the city whole, in good order, with its buildings and infrastructure intact. Otherwise, they have to rebuild it (as they are doing in Mariupol, for example). The Ukraine, besides literally blowing up the buildings (in classic, scorched earth style defense) is de facto engaging in the same tactic by making every city, every block, and practically every building a fortress. Which Russia has to take in detail, causing its destruction.
And, to be fair, the Ukrainian use of this tactic has been pretty successful. Russia fights for weeks and months to take a city (Mariupol, the twin cities, Solidar, and now Bakhmut), only to take over a heap of ruins. I believe defenders in the past, including the Russians in WWII and the 1812 invasion, have openly and proudly used this tactic.
It’s not illegal, and not neccessarily even immoral. But it is what it is. And it’s what the Ukrainians are doing, not the Russians.
Instead of embedding Ukrainian troops in residential buildings Ukraine could declare each city and village an open city or village and fight the Russians outside the urban areas.
It is a war crime to place armed fortified troops in civilian proximity.
Another war crime by Zelensky and his merry band of fascists.