Ukraine’s advance near Bakhmut exposes fractures in Russia’s armed forces
The Ukrainian army is advancing in attacks near the eastern city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian commanders said Friday, in fighting that has only slightly shifted the front line but exposed rifts, confusion and alarm among Russian forces in the war.
Russian pro-war bloggers were quick to claim that Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive had begun, but Ukrainian officials downplayed the advances and described them in more local terms. Ukrainian soldiers broke through Russian lines south of Bakhmut on Wednesday, they said, then took advantage of that breach by attacking Russian troops near the city and threatening Russian flanks to the north and south.
For months Bakhmut has been at the epicenter of the war in eastern Ukraine: a largely destroyed city where tens of thousands of soldiers are said to have died, and the only place for hundreds of miles on the front where Russia has consistently attacked. That changed this week, when Ukraine put Russian troops on the defensive, presented them with a difficult strategic decision about fortifying the city and sparked a new round of accusations between Russian commanders.
Videos released on Friday by Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade showed soldiers piling out of armored personnel carriers and attacking a Russian trench. “Forward forward!” one soldier yelled in the video, filmed with a helmet camera. The soldiers ducked for cover as Russian fighters threw a hand grenade, then ran forward and threw their own grenade into a Russian bunker. The video cannot be independently verified.
“The defensive phase of the battle for Bakhmut is coming to an end,” said Andriy Biletsky, who is ultimately in charge of the brigade, along with other units in the Ukrainian army. Now, he said, Ukraine would step up pressure on Russia from the north and south.
“We advanced a little further up our flank,” said a drone operator from the Adam Tactical Group, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Shem. In an interview on Friday, he described a nighttime seesaw battle south of Bakhmut in which Russian soldiers tried to recapture a position but were repelled by a Ukrainian artillery bombardment.
Another Ukrainian soldier, who gave his call sign Bandit, said that the artillery and rocket fire echoing around the hills near Bakhmut “all our fire went to the Russian side”.
“We are still getting to know the enemy and want to see what he does in this situation,” he said, adding that Ukrainian soldiers were testing Russian positions and “cutting down one forest belt after another”.
A withdrawal from Bakhmut, a city that has no strategic importance but has become a symbolic prize, would be an embarrassing setback for the Russian military. Russia has not taken a Ukrainian city since last July and had penetrated Bakhmut despite massive losses.
It was difficult to estimate whether Ukraine’s advance would hold. Russian forces at one point had driven Ukrainian troops out of all but a few city blocks.
The Ukrainian advance this week cut Russian lines in the largest bulge only about three miles, but its success erased what Moscow’s forces had painstakingly accomplished over several months.
This presents Russia with a difficult choice. If Russia does not strengthen flanking positions around Bakhmut, it risks a politically humiliating setback. But if it directs reserve forces into the city, it could weaken defenses in the south, where many analysts expect Ukraine to strike toward the Sea of Azov in an attempt to cut off a supply route to occupied Crimea.
Ukrainian officials have not portrayed the attacks as the start of a widely anticipated counter-offensive. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with the BBC this week that Ukraine wanted more arms and ammunition before the offensive began.
The stakes of Ukraine’s offensive extend to the country’s efforts to secure more aid: a military breakthrough could convince Western officials to send even more equipment, while a failure or stalemate could lead them to cut back on aid limit or encourage negotiation. European foreign ministers this week urged China’s top diplomat to get Beijing to do more to resolve the war, and China, which has set itself up as a potential mediator as it provides Russia with diplomatic and economic aid, announced that next week an envoy will visit Ukraine and Russia.
Therefore, Ukrainian leaders, well aware of their reliance on Western support, have taken pains to distinguish recent attacks from the wider offensive. The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, General Oleksandr Syrsky, this week described Ukraine’s actions as mainly defensive, but said soldiers were able to “carry out effective counter-attacks”.
“In some parts of the front, the enemy could not resist the attack of the Ukrainian defenders and retreated to a distance of up to two kilometers,” he said in a statement.
But Russian military bloggers have expressed alarm over Kiev’s gains near Bakhmut. The bloggers, who often report from the front and have ties to various commanders or the Wagner mercenary group, are staunchly pro-war and could be influential in Russia, urging Moscow to commit more resources to the fight.
“Wagner gave a lot of blood and sweat for this area, some gave their lives,” wrote Aleksandr Yaremchuk, a Russian military correspondent aligned with Wagner, whose fighters led the nearly year-long battle for Bakhmut. “I find it hard to believe that other units give up their positions so easily.”
The outcry received rare acknowledgment from Russia’s defense ministry, which said on Friday that its troops were withdrawing to an area around Bakhmut.
Wagner’s head, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, seemed to support the bloggers’ view. On Thursday, he posted an open letter to Russian Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu about the losses on the flanking positions, saying that “the enemy had launched several successful counter-attacks.”
The deluge of messages, videos and statements also exposed tensions and fault lines between the various Russian forces in Ukraine. Mr. Prigozhin, long a harsh critic of Mr. Shoigu and other top officials, released a series of expletive-laden audio and video messages this week, including remarks that some observers interpreted as his first direct criticism of Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin .
Cracks erupted elsewhere, too, when Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, whose paramilitary forces have fought alongside Wagner in Ukraine, criticized his old ally Mr Prigozhin in a wide-ranging video.
Some prominent Russian pro-war bloggers warned that the hostility was beginning to affect battlefield performance at a crucial moment.
“There is no command that is respected without exception”, wrote a blogger, Anastasia Kashevarova. “We have a mass of people at the front and no one can come to terms with each other.”
“The enemy,” she added, “is using this.”
Anatoly Kurmanaev And Maria Varenikova reporting contributed.