It took the Kremlin nearly a year and the lives of thousands of soldiers to take Bakhmut, but now that Russian forces appear to be in control of the Ukrainian city, it is right to doubt the value of what they have gained.
The Russian state media was triumphalist. A news anchor over the weekend declared, “Mission accomplished” in a segment that quoted a Russian fighter as comparing Bakhmut’s capture to the Soviet Union’s capture of Berlin in 1945.
By taking Bakhmut, Russia has made its most significant territorial advance since last summer, one that Moscow will try to throw at the Russian people after months of embarrassing setbacks as a sign of military prowess on the battlefield. Now that his administration has determined the story of the war for a domestic audience, President Vladimir V. Putin has largely hidden its cost, including in Bakhmut, from the Russian people.
A top Ukrainian official on Monday essentially acknowledged the loss of the eastern city, saying the Russians were “cleaning up” to remove the remaining Ukrainian soldiers from the ruins of Bakhmut.
The official, General Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of the Ukrainian ground forces, said those few troops would continue to defend their ground to “provide opportunities to enter the city in case of a change of circumstances” – suggesting that their focus changed from defending Bakhmut to make it difficult for Russians to hold it.
Indeed, Russia’s grip on the city is far from assured. And aside from the politics and symbolism of capturing Bakhmut, experts say it is highly unlikely that Moscow can turn the capture of a devastated city into further gains that will support Mr Putin’s ultimate goal of taking over the entire Donbas region in eastern to take Ukraine.
No independent tally of total casualties is verifiable, and each side is believed to be inflating the other’s losses while hiding their own. But the Ukrainian military has determined that no fewer than 20,000 Russian troops have been killed in the months-long battle and more than 100,000 wounded, said a senior Ukrainian military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Ukraine’s military strategy. He made his estimate two months ago and warned that it was a very rough estimate.
“Thousands are still rotting there,” the official said.
Ukraine has also suffered major losses. While Ukrainian officials have declined to give an exact number, their toll likely includes many thousands killed and injured.
The city, once home to about 80,000 people, is largely a shambles, with no electricity, water or anything else that could support an occupying force or serve as a base for launching further incursions into Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian army has fallen back to much more defensible lines on higher ground outside the city.
What this means, according to military experts, is that the Russian forces, which have taken Bakhmut, now have limited options to move forward.
“Look up ‘Pyrrhic Victory’,” says Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research group based in London. “A victory that inflicts so many casualties on the side that supposedly wins the battle that it doesn’t actually help them achieve their strategic goals.”
This is most likely what Russia achieved in Bakhmut, Mr. Barry, though he warned there were many unknowns, including the possibility that Russia had reserved its more elite, well-prepared units for additional offensive operations along the vast Eastern Front. Ultimately, however, few significant changes on the battlefield are to be expected, according to Mr. Barry and other experts.
A document from the leaked Pentagon material circulated online last month describes the Russian campaign in the Donbas as “on the way to exhaustion”.
“Russian tactics have reduced Russian forces and ammunition supplies to a level that ruling out a contingency recovery could deplete Russian units and frustrate Moscow’s war goals, resulting in a protracted post-2023 war,” the document said.
Russia also faces another challenge. Hours after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner’s private military company that led the assault on Bakhmut, declared the weekend’s “victory”, he said he would withdraw his fighters from Thursday.
“From 1 June, no Wagner PMC fighter will be in the vanguard until we undergo reformation, re-equipment and additional training,” Mr Prigozhin said.
Withdrawing troops from an active front is no easy task. Given widespread tensions between Wagner and Russia’s military leadership and communication problems within Russian ranks, analysts say Ukraine will be on the lookout for cracks that can be exploited.
In addition, Ukrainian forces are preparing for a major counter-offensive at a distance from Bakhmut, along hundreds of kilometers of front lines.
The Battle of Bakhmut has been a slog for both armies, consuming resources, people and time for what appears to be limited strategic gains. But Russia has borne that cost outrageously, according to pundits and Ukrainian and Western officials, all looking for a battlefield victory that eluded the Kremlin for months.
When it started last summer, the battle for Bakhmut was more strategic. At the time, Russian forces controlled a large area in northeastern Ukraine and had set up a large military staging area in Izium, a railway hub in the northwestern part. By pushing south and towards Bakhmut from there, the Russian forces hoped to drive the Ukrainian army out of the northern part of the Donetsk region by encircling two major cities there, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
But a swift offensive by Ukrainian troops in late summer and autumn drove the Russian army out of Izium and much of northeastern Ukraine. This removed the Russian threat from the north and allowed Ukraine to fully deploy its forces against Russian forces moving in from the east.
“You could argue that after losing Izium, the Russian military has no way to encircle this part of the Donbas,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a Virginia-based defense research institute. who was in Bakhmut this year.
The city, he said before the Russians took almost full control this weekend, “is likely to make a tactical gain at a strategic cost and, at the cost of ammunition and manpower, may not make much strategic sense.”
While Russia has used military contractors and former prisoners of Wagner for most of the fighting, Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut have come from both the regular army and elite special forces, which Ukraine cannot afford to waste.
Western allies had also questioned whether Ukraine was making the best use of its ammunition by taking up position in a place of seemingly limited strategic value. There are also sharp questions from the Ukrainian public – as well as grumbling in the ranks – about the leaders’ decision to keep the armed forces in the city for so long rather than moving them to more defensible positions outside Bakhmut.
By doing so, they trapped Ukrainian troops in fixed battle lines that did not favor Kiev’s strengths, Kofman and others said. The Ukrainian military has been most successful when its units have been given the flexibility to adapt and operate creatively in battles, attacking where they can find an advantage but also retreating when the odds tilt against them.
Just as Ukrainian officials said they wanted to exhaust Russian troops at Bakhmut and kill as many as possible. Mr. Prigozhin, Wagner’s leader, said his aim in Bakhmut was to exhaust the Ukrainians there, not to take the city.
But there are other reasons why the Ukrainians held on for so long.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said that voluntarily ceding any territory, even for tactical gain, would be unconscionable given the abuses Russian forces have committed against civilians in occupied territories.
As both sides prepare for the next phase of fighting, Russia’s goal of taking all of Donbas seems no closer than it did months ago, and perhaps even further away.
Bakhmut stood in the way of that goal like a brick wall. Russia gradually damaged and eventually claimed the city. But the end result of such a strategy would always be a pile of bricks.