Ukraine defends roads to key city
Kyiv counts stalemate in battle for access routes as a win
KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine — The seesaw fight for a sunflower field raged for weeks with neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces gaining an upper hand, but for Ukraine’s army, that counts as a win in the crucial battle for access roads into the city of Bakhmut.
Inside the battered eastern Ukrainian city, the site of one of the longest-running battles of Russia’s war in Ukraine, urban combat is raging in pitched, block-by-block fights for control. Here, Russian forces have been slowly advancing.
But in farm fields and villages on Bakhmut’s outskirts, Ukrainian military officials say Kyiv’s forces have fought the Russian army essentially to a standstill in the battle for two key roads, the T504 highway and a route known as the 506.
Six weeks after the start of a Ukrainian operation to reinforce supply lines outside Bakhmut and protect the roads, Ukrainian military officials say they have thwarted, at least for now, a Russian effort to sever those roads and surround the city.
To the southwest of Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces have fought hard to protect the T504 highway. Ukraine’s soldiers made a tactical retreat of a few hundred yards and now hold a commanding position in a trench overlooking the sunflower field. The field is one of dozens the Ukrainians must defend along the front to the south of the road.
“Every day is the same,” said a Ukrainian soldier who asked to be identified only by rank and name, Pvt. Ruslan, in keeping with Ukrainian military rules.
Russians fire mortars or send small groups of troops forward, nothing more, he
said.
“They check us, ‘Hey guys, are you still there?’” Ruslan said of the fighting. “When they understand that yes, we are here, we will fight, they back off.”
In late February, Ukraine was close to losing the battle for Bakhmut, according to an assessment in a batch of what appear to be classified operational briefs prepared by the Pentagon and Joint Staff and leaked on social media this month. Senior U.S. officials have said the FBI has opened an inquiry into the leak.
At the time, two Russian flanking maneuvers to the northwest and southwest of the city were close to encircling Bakhmut. A single access road, the 506, remained open for Ukrainian forces and the few civilians who remained in the city, but it was under Russian artillery fire. Ukraine’s commanding general
in the east, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, called the route the “last breathing tube.”
Ukrainian commanders decided to reinforce the defenses of the roads rather than retreat, according to the leaked documents. Ukraine’s army deployed many soldiers to the fight for Bakhmut that it had hoped to hold in reserve for a counteroffensive anticipated in the coming weeks or months, and its forces have sustained heavy casualties.
A visit to the front line south of the T504 highway Friday found the line of contact running through rolling farm fields cut by ravines, with groves of trees and small meadows covered in green grass and small purple wildflowers, and dotted with craters from mortars.
To reach the trenches, Ukrainian soldiers walk spread out, keeping 20 yards
or so between them, lest a shell by chance hit a large group. At one position, two soldiers with shovels dug into a hillside, burrowing out a new bunker.
Col. Serhiy Ilnytsky, the soldiers’ commander, who uses the nickname Sokil, or the Falcon, said the goal for Ukraine in the battle of Bakhmut was not so much to protect the city — once home to around 70,000 people, it is now mostly ruined — as to bog down and weaken the Russian army before the anticipated counteroffensive.
“Bakhmut is just a pile of stones now,” he said. “It’s just a place where Russian soldiers go through the meat grinder.”
Of his position in the fighting for the access roads, he said he felt it was solid.
“I now have the field in front of me,” he said. “For me, it’s a good spot.”