Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address on Monday that the situation around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is getting “more and more difficult” as Russian forces are closing in.
“The situation is getting more and more difficult. The enemy is constantly destroying everything that can be used to protect our positions, to gain a foothold and ensure defense,” Zelensky said.
Russian and Ukrainian forces have been locked in battle over Bakhmut since August 2022. Russia started making more gains in mid-January and is slowly encircling the city.
Bakhmut is a small city in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast with a pre-war population of about 70,000. Ukrainian forces have been taking heavy casualties defending the city, a fight that Ukraine’s Western backers don’t think is worth expending so many resources.
A former American Marine fighting in Ukraine told ABC News last week that the average lifespan of a Ukrainian soldier on the frontlines in Bakhmut is only four hours, and called the area a “meat grinder.”
Zelensky hinted last week that he was thinking of withdrawing from Bakhmut when he said the city was worth defending but not at any cost. “Yes, it is not a particularly big town. In fact, like many others in Donbas, (it’s been) devastated by the Russians. It is important for us to defend it, but not at any price and not for everyone to die,” he said.
If I were Mr. Z, I would tell Wash. to go to hell, (as if they aren’t) and start negotiations before more of his people are killed in vain. But, he takes his orders from Wash., so that won’t happen, will it?
How many soldiers does the Ukraine have anyway. Surely they are vastly outnumbered. Eventually they will be down to less than 1000 then what.
About half a million including reservists when the war started, they’ve done a lot of conscription since then to replace their losses. They probably still have half a million, but Russia’s now deployed enough soldiers to out number them.
The more important question, in my mind, is how many highly qualified soldiers are available. Ukraine, with its conscription policies, can put a lot of men in the field. But Zelensky often uses such inexperienced soldiers as cannon fodder. It has recently been reported that, in some places, such soldiers are killed within the first 4 hours of battle.
Yes, but Russia has more and are doing basically the same thing. Eventually there will be let’s say 4000 halfway decent Ukranian fighters left and 400,000 Russians.
So; the bottom line is that, except for the first week or so of the war, Ukraine has always had more men in the field than Russia. At the time of invasion, Ukraine’s regular forces numbered about 250,000 men, plus numerous paramilitary and security formations; additionally, they claim to have had “1,000,000” reservists, all of whom were presumably called up when they ordered full mobilization and banned anyone between 18-60 from leaving the country.
Russia attacked with perhaps 200,000 men, plus those of the DPR/LPR, so maybe 250,000 in total as well; but haven’t significantly increased the size of their commitment until this last callup of @ 350,000 men.
“Numbers” of soldiers has always been on Ukraine’s side; but the firepower advantage is heavily on Russia’s, and that’s worth a lot more. The shortness of “men on the ground” is largely the reason Russia pulled back so quickly in the November counteroffensives; they were stretched far too thin. But now that they have a very defensible position in the south (the Dnieper river, with all it’s bridges blown) and have redirected the forces on the Kharkiv front to the Donbas, the situation is much different.
Unless something extraordinary happens, Bakhmut will likely be in a cauldron sometime in the next 2 weeks. Once that happens, Ukraine will lose any possibility of pulling its troops out.
In my opinion, the major highways that run through Bakhmut are the reason it is so important to the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine). Taking Bakhmut out of play impedes Ukraine’s ability to move troops, equipment, and ammunition all along the eastern front. Once the cauldron is established, Bakhmut can no longer function as a logistical hub.
It remains to be seen if Russia will try to conquer the remaining AFU forces there. Fewer people will die on both sides by waiting for necessities inside the cauldron to run out. But it would also hold Wagner forces in place when they are needed elsewhere.
Already, with direct observed fire on all roads, Ukraine’s forces are in a Falaise Gap style debacle. Whatever forces are in there are gone. It is either a disaster, or they already snuck out without anybody reporting it.
Since these posts, something unexpected happened. AFU troops are evacuating Bakhmut at night by walking through the fields and avoiding the roads.
Um… HE is the one who has sent in new conscripts constantly, letting them die in the thousands, to keep Bakhmut. The lynchpin city in the “Zelensky line” as he calls it, occupying western Donbass.
German military intelligence and also the Pentagon have urged him to stop defending the city. Just a few days ago he fired the commander of the Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut. Why? Probably because that man, closer to the blood bath on the ground, urged a withdrawal.
Western reporters are now forbidden from entering Bakhmut – and they can’t anyway, since they aren’t allowed to move on roads which can be shelled by the Russians. No western roads remain to Bakhmut that aren’t reached by Russian artillery. Reporters and soldiers have talked about a “meat grinder”. Dead bodies lie unburied on the ground and are run over by Ukrainian vehicles again and again.
The media have then tried to turn that word around, and claim it’s the Russians who are caught in a “meat grinder”. Let’s examine that. Most soldiers are killed by artillery. Russia fires more than 20,000 shells a day, Ukraine is down to about 3,000. Ukraine’s remaining air force is now gone, so Russia can move even freer in the skies. Their planes roar over the city.
The Russians have found the bodies of men in their sixties in the Ukrainian trenches. So once again, like in Mariupol, the Zelensky regime sends in untrained old men to die while other troops are training behind the lines. Not only old men but very young men. While those with more experience, the ones still alive, are training and getting equipment. This is about the most callous disregard for human decency we have heard of so far in this war. Aside from Ukraine’s torture and murder of dissenters, like the mayor who committed the crime of contacting the Russians to open up a human corridor.
The signs are pointing to a disaster at Bakhmut, if and when the Russian pincers close. Given the conditions of the ground right now (soft and muddy) the only way anyone is getting out is via the roads, and all but one are either under Russian control or under direct Russian line-of-sight fire. How the largely immobile forces in the city could be expected to get out under those conditions is a mystery; but certainly if they try they will end up leaving all their heavy equipment and supplies behind.
They should have withdrawn back in January. The Russians don’t have to “take” the city; just close off the last road out and then continue pounding the defenders with artillery – just like they did to the defenders of Mariupol in the steel works.
Here’s the significance of Bakhmut:
For the Ukrainian forces, every day they hold off the Russian forces and keep those forces focused on Bakhmut is another day of US/EU/NATO arms and supplies arriving to affect the balance of force in their favor.
For the Russian forces, taking Bakhmut is the key to securing the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, but there are various reasons for doing so by protracted siege.
One of those reasons is that as long as the battle remains static, the Ukrainian supply lines are longer while the Russian supply lines are shorter.
A second reason is that as long as Bakhmut is in contention and it’s not back to a maneuver warfare scenario, Russian forces are free to 1) pour the “limited mobilization” reinforcements into Donetsk/Luhansk, 2) Displace forces now occupying Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts to Donetsk/Luhansk, and 3) create a defensible line of control encompassing Donetsk, Luhansk, and possibly a small land corridor on the Azov coastline connecting them to Crimea.
Once that’s accomplished, the Russian forces have options.
The best option is to declare “victory” and a unilateral ceasefire, and let the Ukrainian forces decide whether they want a hundred Bakhmuts in reverse trying to contest that line of control, or whether they’re willing to return to “frozen conflict” having lost basically only two republics that seceded eight years ago anyway.
The other option is to apply whatever new doctrine they may have developed over the last year to be able to fight in a combined arms / maneuver warfare environment and perhaps do better than they did last time, in hopes of conquering Kherson and/or Zaporizhia, or perhaps even moving on Odessa, etc.
The wild card in all that is Belarus. Last week, on successive days, Putin’s satrap there:
1) Ostentatiously announced that Belarus would only get involved again “if Ukraine attacks Belarus” (wink, nudge); and
2) Ostentatiously announced that he was forming a new military outfit four times the size of Belarus’s existing army “to defend Belarus in case Ukraine attacks” (wink, nudge).
Which raises the question of whether the intent is just to scare the Ukrainians and hold some of their forces in place because they fear Lukashenko wheeling out a false flag “Ukrainian attack” so that Putin can open a new front, or whether said wheeling out is indeed in the offing. I suspect the former, but I could be wrong.
I agree, except for the part about the “small” corridor connecting Donetsk to Crimea; Zaporizhe Oblast is, like Kherson Oblast south of the river, vital to the security of Crimea and those territories, already mostly under Russian control, are going to stay that way if Russia has anything to say about it. They are, in fact, far more important to Russia strategically and economically (because they deny Ukraine any military access to the Sea of Azov, and any economic access to its energy resources) than the remnants of Donetsk province would be.
On another note I think evaluations of Russia’s “maneuver warfare” capability are being oversimplified; last year’s invasion was done with far too few men, and far too little preparatory fires – virtually none, in fact – on the deluded belief that Ukraine wasn’t likely to fight back. They don’t have to develop new doctrine, just actually apply their existing doctrine (massive preparatory fires, including SEAD, and then deploy overwhelming mass at the center of influence under cover of their airpower – just like we did in Desert Storm about 150 years ago) but I fail to see why they would even bother. They have no interest in inheriting a wasteland – the “grinding” battles in Donbas are against localised, dug in Ukrainian troops that are being reinforced constantly as the Russians pound them; the casualty exchange HAS to be overwhelmingly in Russia’s favor in these encounters; and the more they pound them now, the more likely that if/when the Ukrainian defenses break Donetsk will be Russian.
I think Belarus is a side show – but if it turns out that the Ukes DID in fact destroy the Russian AWACS inside Belarus, then Lukashenko has his “casus beli”.
The doctrine the US applied in Desert Storm 150 years ago wouldn’t work if the US applied it today against any opponent with the newer generations air-defense systems and man-portable anti-tank weapons. The hypothetical US M-1s nowwould look a lot like the actual Iraqi T-54s/T-55s/T-72s did then (and they looked pretty ugly — I had to crawl onto or into a few of them).
The Russians demonstrated that last year. “Infantry supported by armor” no longer gets the job done, and manned fixed-wing aircraft are flying coffins, and while drones are replacing manned fixed-wing aircraft because they can be deployed in cheap swarms and tax air defenses, they can’t suppress them. As to what’s going to replace tanks, that’s the $64 question.
If the Russians are exceptionally crafty and lucky, they may be able to hold on to that land corridor. If they continue to try to pretend, with the pretense backed by force, that Zaporizhia and/or Kherson oblast as a whole are “part of Russia,” they’ll still be dying in action there long after I’ve died of old age.
I guess we’ll see. The Russians didn’t perform SEAD in any meaningful way, nor did they “prep” the battlefield with concentrated fires before attempting the initial advance. And those were always key ingredients in “Soviet Era” doctrine. But assuming you’re right; if combined arms operations are no longer effective, why would you expect that Ukraine would be able to have any success moving in the opposite direction against an enemy that heavily outguns them and has air superiority? The November Ukrainian offensives look far more like strategic “economy of force” withdrawals by the Russians (leaving the far side of the river to the Ukes while digging in on the much more defensible southern bank, and continuing to pound the positions they abandoned with fires) than any Ukrainian prowess.
Well, you’ve put your finger on it:
Meaningful victories in this war are a function of being the force in a defensive strategic posture.
The reason the Russian forces are offensively concentrated on Bakhmut is so that, once it’s taken, they can assume an overall defensive posture that encompasses Donetsk/Luhansk.
The reason the Ukrainian forces are defensively concentrated in Bakhmut is because being so buys them time, likely at a fraction of the casualty count of offensive maneuver elsewhere. They’re not continuing their high-casualty offensives around e.g.. Kherson because doing so would cost them more and gain them nothing they won’t get anyway as the Russian forces withdraw to a defensible final line of control.
How were the Russian forces supposed to “meaningfully perform SEAD?”
They couldn’t do it from the air because today’s air defenses eat manned, fixed-wing aircraft for lunch and because missiles don’t grow on trees. It can’t be done with artillery until the range is closed considerably — and closing the range puts your e.g. 2S35 Koalitsiya-SVs (range — 80km with rocket assist) at risk.
Thirty-two years ago, when Iraqi air defense radars lit up, US aircraft took them out. Now, when an air defense radar lights up, it’s aircraft that get taken out.
SEAD is normally done with radar detecting aircraft and anti-radar missiles (akin to the US wild weasel tactics), or by massive area saturation by artillery, which was the point of Russia (ex-soviet) investment in long range multiple launch rocket systems and the old FROG systems, massed into independent artillery groups assigned to critical fronts. We spent months doing that in Iraq preparatory to the ground assault (including an entire independent FA brigade, 3 BNs of MLRS, some 54 launch vehicles behind VIIth Corps alone)) ; I would have expected the Russians to do this for at least a few days before advancing; they didn’t do it at all. But I expect that for any advance they attempt in the future, you will see this done now; especially what we used to call “shaping the battlefield” through fires.
I think the Ukrainians are holding Bakhmut because, over the last 8 years, they’s prepared extensive systems of bunkers and ammunition dumps along the border between U and DPR/LPR controlled territory; they didn’t rush to defend Bakhmut as much as reinforce what was already there. I think if/when that line cracks, there will be nothing much behind it until the Dneiper River. Listening to the comments on CNN by their stable of paid retired shills (err…”Generals”) whistling past the graveyard with their “predictions” is really disturbing.
SEAD is done all sorts of ways. I did it with 81mm mortars in every role up to and including fire direction center chief (which entailed working with forward air controllers to time barrages immediately before and after aircraft passed through).
Or, rather, it WAS done in all sorts of ways until air defense systems passed the threshold where it could only be done effectively at artillery range — if then.
Semantics maybe, but I wouldn’t consider anything done at BN level to be “SEAD” in the traditional sense; that’s more on the order of “making the bad guys keep their heads down so my helo can get in”. “SEAD” as we learned it was supposed to be an integrated plan done usually at Corps level, and involves identifying the Blue/Green air avenues of approach, and planning fires to suppress bad guys along those areas. – and I believe that’s how Soviet doctrine called for it, including establishing what we called the “JAAT” (joint air artillery targeting(?)” clock, that synchronized suppressive fire missions with air/helo strikes immediately following. That’s still US doctrine – and as I said, there doesn’t appear to have been anything of that nature done by the Russians in their initial assault. And, of course, for the deep battle, outside artillery range, the air force did their own thing with the wild weasel missions. I’m thinking those missions are going to be given to long loitering “stealthy” drones; and probably not something the Russians would be proficient at. But pretty sure they have the “massive suppressive fires in coordination with air strikes” down in their play book.
Just to add; FM 3-09 (Field Artillery Operations) is available on line and goes into pretty good detail both on the artillery’s role in SEAD and in shaping the battlefield; that’s not new stuff, and the Soviets were teaching that themselves 40 years ago. I get that ADA has improved in the past decade, but my point is that the Russians didn’t even TRY these techniques in the first stage of the invasion.
Oh, they tried.
But they failed.
War evolves. The machine gun arrives, infantry formations disperse. Gas arrives, gas masks arrive. The old model of SEAD has been made obsolete by much better (and much less detectable for suppression) air defenses. New weapons and new doctrines for SEAD will come along that will change the equation once again. The question is whether they have yet. Maybe the Russians have something up their sleeve in that area. If so, we’ll presumably see it soon.
81mm mortars are a battalion-level weapon, but using them for SEAD is not an internal battalion-level operation. I never did SEAD for “so my helo can get in” missions. I did it for e.g. close air support and anti-tank ops by fixed-wing aircraft. Those aircraft were not only not in my battalion, they usually weren’t even in my branch of service. I might be working with a Navy FAC and Air Force pilots.
What an idiot. This is precisely what he has done in every single standoff — insure everyone dies , so he can drag “defence”, act heroic , spin myths. But in reality, people are brough there to die. While not in physical encirclement — all the roads leading to Bakhmut are under Russian fire control.
One cannot help it but feel that Zelenski does not like people very much. More, he must hate them. Never once did I here anything authentic from this man. Some real sorrow. Compassion.
The population and soldiers are merely props in the story of democracy vs autocracy. Agressor vs innocent lamb, with pious NATO preaching from the pulpit of righteousness.
Soonething just feels wrong.
Zelensky Says Bakhmut Lost