Explainer: Why is Russia Trying So Hard to Capture the Small Ukrainian City of Bakhmut?

“Not Galicians or Ruthenians, who were ruled under the Austrio Hungarian Empire 200 years ago.”

That is exactly who was there. Novorossiya before being claimed as New Russia was the lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Those Cossacks were free peasants that had left the Polish controlled western regions. They thus spoke Ukrainian and were of Ukrainian culture.

The thing Russians most fail to understand is they will lose this war because they are fighting against history. Ukraine for 3000 years has been part of the West. It was part of the Greek world, then the Viking age, then Poland. The Black Sea trade routes and the rivers mean it will always be oriented south and west. Not north towards Moscow.

Only very recently did Muscovy try to claim it, but the only way that unnatural union has ever held is by total Muscovite repression of Ukraine’s natural position in the world.

Those Cossacks were free peasants that had left the Polish controlled western regions.

Not really. The Crimean Tartars had been extracting resources and slaves from the Wild Fields until a few decades before 200 years ago (time period you selected). The countervailing Sich organizations were not homogenious. The Cossaks famously played on whatever side suited their interest, whether it was Russian, Polish-Lithuanian or Tartar. This flexibility in allegiances is a clear indication the Cossaks came from many regions, and not just Galicia.

After the defeat of the Crimean Tartars, the economy in the economucally exhausted Wild Fields region developed as part of Russia. To be certain, the Russians vanquished the Crimean Tartar slave taking economy, which was essentially a holdover from the Golden Horde. Following this vanquishment, the Cossaks became of great service to the Tsar. There is little doubt that some Cossaks knew Ruthenian. But at this time (200 yeaes ago) Galicia/Ruthenia was under Austro-Hungarian suezeranty. This was long before the notion of a Ukranian nationality was even incipient.

So the connection between Cossaks and Ukranian nationalism is extraordinarily attenuated, and not direct as you seem to suggest.

The thing Russians most fail to understand is they will lose this war because they are fighting against history. Ukraine for 3000 years has been part of the West.

Are you making the case that the Scythians are "Western"? The general migration pattern firmly in place 1000 BCE in the Pontic Czspian Steppe was plainly east to west. The Yamnaya Culture is arguably the foundation for the entirety of Europe. So it can be said the entirety of the West came from the East.

As far as being "against history," electric chairs and lightning bolts arc, not history.

Seizing Bakhmut is a secondary objective which the Drive by Media like Moscow Times is not expected to know about or understand. The Objective of the Wagner Group, the principle attacker, is to kill as many UA troops as possible using convict troops.

This is the exchange of low value material (convicts) for high value material (UA troops) - the job of the convicts is to kill as many UA troops as possible, then die, to be replaced by more convicts, thus emptying out Russian prisons, in a cost saving measure.

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