Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast
“I guess the Russians will be here in a week,” 65-year-old Viktor tells me as he sits on a bench chewing sunflower seeds in the empty streets of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine. “I’ll stay of course — I have nowhere else to go. It’s fucking horrible. There’s no gas, and already my wife and I are preparing paraffin lamps for when the electricity goes. What else can we do?” Once a thriving industrial town centered on its vast salt mine, Bakhmut is now almost deserted as the bloody war in Ukraine’s Donbas region reaches deeper into Ukrainian government-held territory.
Entering Bakhmut, at the end of a long drive passed by military vehicles going towards the front, and ambulances and fuel trucks coming back, a line of black smoke clouds stands out against the blue sky as Ukrainian artillery pounded the Russian tanks approaching the city limits. Elite Russian forces, believed to include the 90th Guards Tank Division and the VDV paratroops who were so badly mauled in the failed encirclement of Kyiv at the beginning of the war, are now only around 5km to the east of Bakhmut, and 9km to the north. Images from social media indicate the Russian army has deployed its new, and rare BMPT “Terminator” vehicles, specifically designed for gruelling urban combat, on the approaches to the city, perhaps indicating preparation for an assault sooner than many observers expect.
Ukraine’s stunning and unexpected string of victories over the Russian invaders in the first phase of the war may have bred a sense of complacency in well-meaning outside observers. A narrative has evolved, particularly among Ukraine’s Western supporters, that the Russian army is a paper tiger, that its soldiers are a rabble of undermotivated conscripts and that its generals are inept. But here in the Donbas region, where the Russians have concentrated their forces behind a creeping, devastating wall of artillery firepower, Russia holds a clear advantage.
Lightly-equipped and poorly-trained Territorial Defence volunteers have been sent from Ukraine’s western regions to plug the gaps, as the grinding war of attrition by artillery takes its toll on the regular army. Outnumbered by seven to one in some areas, according to Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy, Ukrainian forces are outranged by Russian artillery and outmatched by newly-concentrated Russian armour. Russian language propaganda, rarely transcribed in Western narratives, is exultant: Ukrainians are bracing for the worst.
The Ukrainian government’s official messaging seems to be preparing the country for hard news, with Zelenskyy warning the nation that “the situation in Donbas is extremely difficult” as the Russians push towards Sloviansk and Severodonetsk. Last Thursday, Zelenskyy’s presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych warned that Russia is trying to create “a new Mariupol” in the Donbas, adding that “we are in a difficult situation, and it will get worse”, as “there may be encirclements, abandonment of positions, and heavy casualties” because “they have superiority in artillery and aviation… To put it mildly, we’re barely afloat.”
The day before I arrived in the Donbas, Russian troops captured the town of Lyman 20km northeast of Sloviansk, well within artillery range, and are now focusing their fire on the small town of Rayhorodok, the last settlement between Sloviansk and the Russian army. From the north and from the southeast, outside Bakhmut — the Russian pincer already threatening to encircle thousands of the Ukrainian army’s most experienced and best equipped forces is now arching wider to slowly squeeze Sloviansk itself.
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