Posted on 01/14/2023 10:49:29 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
For the past five months, the fighting around one small city in eastern Ukraine has resembled scenes from World War I: a place where soldiers are fighting from old-style trenches, where waves of soldiers make often-fatal charges over open land — and where gains are counted in tiny patches of territory.
The small city is Bakhmut. And as the overall war grinds on, Bakhmut isn’t just a particularly violent battleground. It’s also the most important contest of the war.
Bakhmut’s importance has risen since November, when Ukraine retook the southern city of Kherson and the onset of winter slowed the pace of fighting elsewhere. This week, Russia claimed to have captured the town of Soledar, an even smaller city less than 10 miles outside Bakhmut. The Ukrainian government claims its troops are still holding out there, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged that the situation in the city is “difficult.”
“And what did Russia want to gain there?” Zelenskyy asked in a televised address. “Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left. And thousands of their people were lost: The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”
Madness or not, a victory in Soledar, prewar population of about 10,000, would mark some of the first progress the Russian war effort has demonstrated in months. The capture of Bakhmut would be an even more significant propaganda victory and likely also a boost to the political standing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin insider whose Wagner Group, a shadowy private military contractor, has been doing the bulk of the fighting there, often publicly clashing with Russia’s regular military in the process.
For Ukraine, the battle has become a symbolic and politically significant struggle.
(Excerpt) Read more at grid.news ...
In the north east, if they had competent generals, the ruwould retreat to the heavily defensible 2015 lines.
They expended a lot of blood for inches
prediction - in 13 months, we’ll be here debating why this war is going into Year Three ...
#quagmire
In hindsight it made sense for Russia to proceed with the battle for Kiev.
Due to their crappy logistics, they failed. And their elite units got wiped out.
Sure they are calling in reinforcements now. But the quality isn't the same.
It’s Putin’s war of attrition. WHen Ukes went in heavily to defend that particular region, Putin decided to hunker down his soldiers and focus on killing the remaining Ukrainian forces. The area is bait - the Ukes think Putin wants to triumph there so they keep going there in large numbers. But Putin wants to destroy enemy soldiers, so he doesn’t remove his troops - day after day they stay and wear down Ukrainian men and hardware. Russia is losing soldiers too, but Ukraine is losing them at a higher rate, so Putin’s strategy is working to drain the Ukraine of the ability to fight, as the Ukraine has signaled it will not negotiate peace until every last Ukrainian soldier and bullet is gone.
Bakhmut is a major crossroads. It can be used to control the region.
The claim either Bakhmut or Soledar is strategic are only bureaucratic rationalizations. Yes, Russia will gain access to a few highways and a rail line. Russian propagandists and their parrots will cheer that Ukraine is in danger of falling after Bakhmut and Soledar likely fall to Russia.
Except they go through mostly open fields to get anywhere else. The Russia fan club should look up what "defense in depth" and remember that Ukraine has had ten months to prepare defenses beyond Bakhmut.
Of course not. As an American you simply don’t understand the Russian way of waging war. There is a great emphasis on reducing of the collateral damage.
The original primary lesson was that this is the first war in history that both sides has excellent near real time satellite recon.
There is now a new lesson, and it is somewhat worrisome.
Russia is clearly unafraid of US weapons.
Like most everyone, I have functioned on a default presumption of technological superiority. The evidence against that is profound, particularly in the space program. Russia has decided there is no US technological superiority.
Right or wrong, this is very dangerous. Unless the Pentagon realizes inferiority. That may be unpleasant, but it is safer.
Ukraine has 22 brigades around Bakhmut front, more soldiers than any area or battle since the start of the war.
If it is not strategic as you say, do you think Ukraine is making a mistake by fighting so hard for it?
They are fighting really hard and taking huge losses for something you say is not of strategic value
You are unfortunately very mistaken in re space tech. Absolutely no one on earth is in a position to compete with SpaceX, an American company. And I mean that there is no competition in any sense
at all.
I have toured their facilities and I have contacts inside.
How do you know of these 22 brigades? Are the all there at the moment, or have they been passing through or have been rotated?
And Russia is very afraid of US weapons. HIMARS forced them to abandon Kherson and their bridgehead over the Dneiper. If the US were to release ATACMS Russian logistics would utterly collapse, because of its interdiction capability. Every bridge, overpass, rail yard, tunnel, etc, including that Crimea bridge, would be gone in a couple of weeks.
And that’s just with division-level US field artillery weapons.
US recon makes it unlikely that Russia can assemble a mass of maneuver without being spotted. This benefits Ukraine above all, as they are fundamentally on the defensive.
Negotiations will not be necessary by that point.
Ukraine and Russia is a European problem. Let them deal with it.
Uh no, it's not. It's strategically worthless.
Heh...
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