Even if Bakhmut is taken, Ukraine could still use it to tie up Russia

While Moscow is trumpeting a “mission accomplished” moment in its war, Ukraine — even as it insists Bakhmut has not completely fallen — sees an opening to seize the initiative from the city’s outskirts if Russian forces are no longer pressing forward inside the city’s center.

Russia’s capture of Bakhmut would represent the first Ukrainian city it has seized since Lysychansk last summer, and be a setback for Ukraine, which expended precious ammunition and sent some of its most capable forces to try to thwart Russia’s devastating monthslong assault on the city. Thousands of troops from both sides are believed to have been killed in nearly a year of intense fighting there.

But the city is now in ruins, and controlling it would not necessarily help Moscow toward its larger stated goal — conquering the entire eastern region of Donbas.

Now that Russia has seemingly taken the city, it must hold it.

NEW: #Wagner Group mercenaries likely secured the western administrative borders of #Bakhmut City while #Ukrainian forces are continuing to prioritize counterattacks on Bakhmut’s outskirts.

Our latest: https://t.co/mCAKoKxKnl pic.twitter.com/KgBtZ4sBE1

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) May 22, 2023

Ukraine, however, plans to make that proposition difficult by raining artillery on Russian forces occupying Bakhmut, according to Ukrainian officials. Military analysts say that if Russia continues to send reinforcements to defend the city, that could weaken Russian forces’ ability to hold off a broader counteroffensive that Ukraine says it is about to begin.

Ukraine’s military said on Sunday that it had launched an overnight strike on the Russian-occupied port city of Berdiansk, the latest attempt to target occupied territory in the country’s south before a widely anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. A Russian occupation official said a missile had fallen on the city’s outskirts but that there were no casualties, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

Ukrainian commanders have said that their goal all along in Bakhmut was to pin down the Russian army in a protracted fight, kill as many of its soldiers as possible and buy time for Ukraine to prepare and rearm — with Western weapons — for a wider counteroffensive.

A Russian capture of Bakhmut “will mean nothing, actually,” predicted Col. Serhiy Hrabsky, a commentator on the war for the Ukrainian news media. “The Russians have exhausted their offensive capabilities, and that is why they so desperately declare they have captured Bakhmut.”