As Russians inch forward near Bakhmut, Ukrainians dig fallback defenses

DONETSK REGION, UKRAINE >> The closest Ukrainian artillery position to the raging battle for Bakhmut is tucked into a leafless tree line about 13,000 feet from the enemy. The fighters here have been hanging on for weeks, lobbing 122mm shells at the Russians straining to encircle the city. If the Russians push even a bit closer, the Ukrainians will have to move their guns back simply to keep from firing over the enemy’s heads, the platoon leader said Tuesday.

“If they get any closer our guns are not effective,” said the leader, Oleksander, as a crossfire of Ukrainian howitzers and Russian rockets whistled overhead. His own mobile artillery piece boomed into the snowfall, shaking flakes onto the log covered bunker where his troops have been living since December, as smoke drifted from the spent shell they use as a chimney.

“Today we are still holding them, but it is very dynamic,” said Oleksander, an officer in the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade whom The Washington Post is identifying only by his first name to protect his safety. “It can change in a day.”

But even if the Russians move forward, they will not get far, he said. Combat earthmovers were digging new trench lines on a ridge just a few hundred yards farther west.

All around this front line in flux, Ukrainians are preparing for the possibility that Russia will continue its creeping advance. This is a war of feet, not miles — and nowhere is that more apparent than in the wintry countryside outside Bakhmut, which has become the epicenter of Russia’s push to regain momentum in its year-old invasion.

Any Ukrainian fallback is likely to be limited, commanders in the region say. Even if Ukrainian troops give up on their ferocious defense of Bakhmut — a fight that has assumed more symbolic than strategic value, according to military experts — Russia lacks the trained troops and weaponry to rush headlong into the wider Donetsk region.

Rather, the Russians are likely to nudge the Ukrainians back to entrenched positions they are readying around nearby communities, including Chasiv Yar, Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, where the slugfest for territory will continue.

It has happened before. Russian forces last summer took the nearby city of Lysychansk, just over the border in the Luhansk region, after battering it for weeks, and got as far as Lyman 36 miles west, in Donetsk. But they lost Lyman in Ukraine’s counteroffensive last fall. Bakhmut, the next major target in Moscow’s plan to conquer all of southeastern Ukraine, is 37 miles west of Lysychansk and still not firmly in Russia’s grip after months of fighting.