Kyiv: The land being fought over in eastern Ukraine is awash in barren trees, grey skies and terrain that has already begun to turn muddy, rendering movement more arduous: one more risk amid a multitude for soldiers there.
As the freezing land softens and temperatures warm, the roads used to supply the small city of Bakhmut still under Ukrainian forces’ control as of the first week of March have become more problematic. Only a narrow corridor west remains under Ukrainian control, with Russian forces able to target vehicles coming in and going out.
Rain and fog are reportedly making the fight more difficult.
Russia is, through sheer numbers thrown at the battlefield and a heedless attitude towards deaths incurred, continuing to inch forward.
Experts warn that Russian forces may soon either take over or encircle the small city, numbering some 70,000 inhabitants prior to war, thereby trapping soldiers and the few thousand civilians thought to have remained.
The risk of a siege and/or occupation weighs heavily in the minds of those who remember the photos of mass graves Russian forces have left in their wake in multiple other Ukrainian towns they occupied even for a short period, such as Bucha.
Last year’s three-month siege of the much larger city of Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of over 400,000 and is located further south but in the same administrative oblast as Bakhmut, ended with Russia occupying the entire city in May 2022.
The scenes of the Russian encirclement of the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant in Mariupol, where an estimated over 2,000 soldiers and civilians were stuck for weeks, are also ever-present in many of their minds.
A large banner still hangs in central Kyiv urging to “Free Mariupol Defenders”.
Some officials have downplayed the risks of encirclement and stated that not only does Ukraine have enough forces to push Russia back from the city if necessary, but that decisions made about Bakhmut will ultimately be based on whether the goal is to inflict the highest possible losses or to hold the city.
Throughout the war, Ukrainian forces have repeatedly been shown to outperform previous assessments of their capabilities. Many Western policymakers and commentators had initially predicted a quick Russian victory when Moscow invaded on 24 February, 2022 in what was a massive escalation of a conflict underway since 2014.
One year later, Russian forces are hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian capital and forced to rely on massive recruitment of prisoners through a shadowy military contracting company.
Attacks including massive numbers of missiles continue to take place on many areas of the country, however. Russia launched some 81 at several regions in Ukraine over the night between March 8 and March 9, 34 of which were shot down by Ukrainian air defense according to official statements.
Tactical decisions weighed
Serhiy Hrabsky, a Ukrainian military expert and former colonel well known within Ukraine for his analytical assessments, told Al Majalla in an interview in late February in Ukraine that Russia is employing a tactic “we call thousands of cuts”, wearing down Ukrainian forces.
This tactic, he noted, can be effective for the short term though unlikely to be so for any longer period of time.
He added in the interview with Al Majalla that, “maybe Ukrainian forces will withdraw from Bakhmut soon”, presumably due to assessments that the heavily damaged town is not worth losses sustained and/or that the forces deployed on this part of the frontline could be better utilised further south, when a spring offensive by Ukrainian forces is expected to focus.
Others have since echoed this assessment.
Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said 8 March in Stockholm that, “What we see is that Russia is throwing more troops, more forces, and what Russia lacks in quality they try to make up in quantity.”
"They have suffered big losses, but at the same time, we cannot rule out that Bakhmut may eventually fall in the coming days,” he added, noting that "it is also important to highlight that this does not necessarily reflect any turning point of the war."
