RUSSIA POURS TROOPS INTO STRATEGIC CITY
Russian forces are ratcheting up pressure on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, pouring in waves of fighters to break Ukraine’s resistance and targeting supply lines in a bloody campaign aimed at securing Moscow’s first significant battlefield victory in months.
Eleven months after Moscow launched its invasion, Bakhmut and the areas around it have become a center of intense fighting, with growing importance as both sides add forces to the battle. Russia intensified its effort to capture Bakhmut, which may be key to seizing the entire Donbas area, after months of bombardment beginning in the summer yielded few gains.
“The situation is very tough,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a recent nightly address after meeting with military leaders. He said, “There are constant attempts to break through our defense.”
Over the course of the war, firepower has proved critical to Russian gains, but the battle for Bakhmut has been different.
Increasingly, Ukrainian fighters and analysts say, Moscow has been relying on a cruder tactic: trying to tip the city into its win column through the sheer weight of troop numbers. As a result, the Ukrainians say, Russian casualties in recent fighting in Bakhmut have been higher than in previous months.
Bakhmut’s strategic value, military analysts say, is as a crossroads for some of the region’s highways. Capturing the city, which is in Donetsk province, would not guarantee that Moscow could make major advances in the east, but it would put Russian forces in better position to do so.
In the coming weeks and months, as both sides prepare for the offensives expected in the spring, Ukraine will be strengthened by new weaponry, including tanks and rocket systems supplied by the United States and other allies.
On Tuesday, the French defense minister announced that his country would deliver 12 more Caesar howitzers to Ukraine and step up efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers, a significant increase in military aid from a country that had recently shown reluctance to part with more of its advanced artillery.