Bakhmut is on the verge of collapse as Russian forces close in on defenders

Russian forces continued their push to capture the nearly-encircled city of Bakhmut on February 28th after a series of successful attacks by Yevegenzy Prgnozhin’s Wagner Group allegedly pushed Ukrainian defenses to their limits. 

“The most difficult situation, still, is in Bakhmut and the battles that are essential for the defense of the city,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his February 28th address translated by CNN. 

“Russia is not counting people at all, continuously sending them to attack our positions,” the embattled president added. “The intensity of the fighting is growing.”

For more than six months, Bakhmut has been under a near-constant siege after Russian troops and Wagner Group mercenaries began shelling the city after the fall of Popasna in May 2022 according to the Institute for the Study of War. 

Full-scale assaults on Bakhmut from Vladimir Putin’s vaunted Wanger Group began in August but the mercenaries made little progress and were unable to break through Ukranian lines until recently. 

The push to take the Bakhmut intensified after the New Year and Wagner mercenaries were able to capture the key city of Soledar on January 16th after a fiercely bloody battle.

"The enemy literally steps on the corpses of his own soldiers,” wrote Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Malair on her Telegram channel, adding that the Russians used mass artillery attacks that covered “its own soldiers with fire."

One month after Soledar, Wagner took the settlement of Krasna Hora, a small village eleven miles north of Bakhmut, and was within striking distance of Russia's ultimate goal.

Over the February 25th weekend, intense battles were fought all along Ukraine’s last defensive ring around the northern part of Bakhmut, anchored by the villages of Berkhivka and Yahidne—both of which Prigozhin said were under Wagner’s control. 

Photo by Twitter @War_Mapper

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine disputed Prigozhin's claims, and in their situational update on February 28th, they stated that Ukrainian “defense forces” were still repelling attacks in the area of Berkhivka and Yahidne. 

“The situation in Bakhmut is very difficult now. It is much worse than officially reported,” one unnamed Ukranian soldier told CNN on February 28th. “We should add another 100% difficulty to the official reports. In all directions. Especially in the northern direction.”

While the ultimate fate of Bakhmut may still be in limbo, we do know that up until this point in the battle, Russia’s victories have come at the cost of brutal human wave attacks that may have killed and injured tens of thousands of Russian and Wagner soldiers. 

Wagner has lost so many fighters in Bakhmut—5,000 or more killed, thousands more wounded—that the Russian army has had to deploy thousands of paratroopers as reinforcements,” wrote David Axe of Forbes in a February 26th article on the battle. 

"It’s like the First World War," 22-year-old Serhii Hnezdilo told The Guardian's Luke Harding. "The Russians throw their people in so they can symbolically take the city. It’s terrible."

Hnezdilo likened the battle to a “meat grinder,” adding that the “bodies of Russian soldiers are left where they fall. Their own people get injured and cry out. Nobody helps them.”

While judging how many troops each side has fighting in the battle for Bakhmut can be very difficult due to each side's operational security, we can make some rough estimates based on information leaked by various sources. 

In January, the UK Ministry of Defense said that “Wagner almost certainly now commands 50,000 fighters in Ukraine.” We can assume that most of these fighters were probably deployed in the offensives to capture Bakhmut. 

The independent Polish aerospace and defense consulting firm Rochan Consulting estimated in January that Ukraine may have had as many as ten brigades or 30,000 troops defending Bakhmut and the surrounding areas according to information on the Battle of Bakhmut's Wikipedia page, but such claims are extremely difficult to verify. 

Even though we can only guess at the numbers of Russian and Ukranian troops fighting, we do know that a major battle for the fate of Bakhmut is coming—though the outcome of who will win has yet to be determined and things don't look good for Ukraine. 

“The Russians have mostly encircled Bakhmut from three directions,” wrote The Guardian's Luke Harding. “They can shell the only road in and out of the town, a precarious supply route.”

“It is unclear if Ukraine can hang on or will be forced to withdraw,” Harding added, so we should expect to see the battle become one of the most defining of the war.