No one knows who lost the most blood to the Bakhmut ‘meat grinder’
Russians claim to have captured the once-bustling city but their prize could end up becoming a trap
IT WAS more than a year ago but Yana Olha will never forget the day the war came to Bakhmut. “It was near my birthday, so springtime, when explosions hit. We have seen fighting since 2014, but this time the fear was worse,” the 35-year-old Donbas native said. “My elderly mother and father were alone; my husband had to go to save them. I waited at home fearing I would never see the three of them again. I walked up and down like a madwoman,” she added.
Those explosions were only the start of the pivotal battle in this war. Before the Russian invasion, Bakhmut was famous for salt mines and sparkling wine. It survived Russia’s first Donbas invasion, in 2014, relatively unscathed and its wide, leafy streets, red brick houses and bustling central market lent it an historic character unusual in the region’s industrial towns.
At the start, Bakhmut was relatively safe. The old front line, frozen two dozen miles to the south and east since the 2014-2015 conflict, remained stable. But when the Russians abandoned their 2022 assault on Kyiv in favour of a spring campaign in Donbas, it immediately became a target for air- and missile strikes.
Throughout April, May and June that year the city hospital filled with glassy-eyed, bloodied men from the battle in Severodonetsk, 25 miles up the highway to the northeast, and Popasna, to the east. Bakhmut itself remained busy, with the central square and nearby market bustling.
Popasna fell in May 2022. Lystchansk and Severodonetsk followed in early July. And, one month later, the assault on Bakhmut began. From the start, the operation involved Yevgenny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries. They claimed credit for the breakthrough at Popasna and prided themselves as hardened shock troops, finishing jobs the official army would not touch.
However, progress was slow. With their frontal assault bogged down on the eastern edge of town, the Russians began to attack on the flanks. In mid-september they crossed the Bakhmutske river near Mykolaivka Druha, eight miles south of the city, but struggled to turn the foothold into a breakthrough. By late autumn the front stretched 16 miles from Kurdiumivka in the south to Soledar and Bakhmutske to the northeast. Repeated assaults on Opytne, the southern gateway to the city, were pushed back. It was a stalemate.
The Ukrainians at first found the Russian persistence puzzling. Bakhmut is a moderately important Donbas town. It had decent infrastructure and sits at the
‘Soldiers ask: where is my brother? And you take your eyes away and zip the black bag. There are no words ...’
convergence of a railway line and two important roads to Kostanitinivka and Sloviansk but there are other ways to take those cities. Also there are easily defendable highlands to the west, so capturing Bakhmut was never going to trigger a Ukrainian collapse.
Ukrainian soldiers pondered that perhaps the mercenaries were being paid by the metre or Prigozhin had been promised a salt mine concession.
Even as the city came under relentless shellfire, it took civilians a while to come to terms with what was going on. “When I arrived it was absurd,” said one soldier who asked to remain anonymous. “The enemy were already on the outskirts but many did not want to leave their homes. Children were playing on the playgrounds next to the damage from artillery shells.”
They included Ms Olha, who stayed with her husband and infant son in their two-room apartment. “All our friends were long gone. We stayed out of hope that our city would not be lost. We were fools. There is not much left,” she said.
When a Telegraph team took advantage of a miserably rainy day to enter the city last October, it was already a ghost town. The market was shelled to bits. The main road bridge across the river was blown up. Streets were blocked with tank traps; electricity and water supplies were intermittent at best; residents waited for lulls in shelling to buy food.
At the front, the weight of numbers meant that, week by week, the Russians made slow, if tangible gains. “It was so scary, like a fear that gets under your skin. There are so many Russians out there. And they keep advancing and advancing,” said Anastasia Chumenko, a tactical medic who served throughout the battle. “Soldiers ask: where is my brother? And you take your eyes away and zip the black bag. There are no words on this earth to convey that pain,” she said.
“Once, we were working at the rescue operation after a civilian house was struck. It was completely destroyed,” she said. “I opened the door of one apartment ... they were trying to gather some absolutely illogical things. Not documents, not money, but some toys, mugs, pictures … trying to gather their most precious moments before leaving to nowhere.
“I realised that life is too short to waste it for money or a super job because, in the end, you’ll remember your ‘precious moments’.”
As winter wore on other parts of the front became more calm – but not Bakhmut. It was a black hole, exerting a gravity that distorted the landscape of the war. All kinds of Ukrainian agencies – army, police, border guards – were sucked into the vortex. Those deployed knew many would not return.
Commanders in other sectors, speaking privately, began to fret. Bakhmut had taken their tanks, their guns and their best men. “Everything has gone there,” one officer stationed more than 100 miles away told The Telegraph in January. It began to draw comparisons to Verdun. Meanwhile, Prigozhin claimed to be drawing Ukraine’s best units into battle and wearing them down but the Russians were also throwing extra Wagner convict battalions and regular army units into “the meat grinder”. Ukrainian officials, and several Western experts, argued the kill ratio was so heavily in Ukraine’s favour it justified Kyiv’s losses.
Then, just before the New Year, the Russians broke the stalemate, not in Bakhmut, but in Soledar, the small salt-mining town eight miles to the north. “It was the worst battle of the entire war,” said one Ukrainian paratrooper, who described how the Russians sent wave after wave of men who continued to attack no matter how many were gunned down. And yet the sacrifices demanded of Ukraine’s infantry bred a degree of resentment in the trenches. Artillery support would arrive late or not at all, ammunition would run out and commanders seemed reluctant to risk armoured vehicles on resupply runs.
“We were basically told if you retreat, you’re going to prison. So you’re only getting out of there if you are a 200 or 300,” said the paratrooper, using slang for dead or wounded.
Ukraine acknowledged the loss of Soledar on Jan 16. Prigozhin promptly claimed victory in a video. It was, he claimed, an exclusively Wagner operation. Over the coming months his willingness to publicly insult the army’s top brass would expose serious rifts in the Russian command.
By itself, the loss of Soledar might not have been fatal for Bakhmut but at around the same time, over two weeks in mid January, Russian forces between Kurdiumovka and Opytne thrust north-west along the Donetsk canal – aiming not for Bakhmut itself but the highway behind it. By Jan 26 they were within direct firing range of the road, the T-0504, linking Bakhmut and Druzhkivka. A frantic Ukrainian counter strike backed by helicopters stopped them but Bakhmut was at the tip of a vulnerable salient, with the jaws of a Russian encirclement closing from the north and the south.
Inside the city, the Russians were approaching the river, the main line of defence. Rumours began to circulate among soldiers and volunteers about an imminent retreat. Most gave the defence two more weeks at most.
However, the trench warfare continued. Nazar, 29, a soldier in Ukraine’s 10th separate mountain assault brigade, told The Telegraph by text message: “There are a lot of them, they are advancing in numbers, the brigade has been at the front from the beginning ... everyone is tired, we need to rotate but we cannot.”
On March 3, Prigozhin posted another triumphant video telling