Wikipedia Deep Dive

Battle of Bakhmut

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For nearly a year, a small Ukrainian city that most Westerners had never heard of became the site of what some military analysts consider the bloodiest battle since World War II. Bakhmut, a salt-mining town of about 70,000 people before the war, transformed into a grinding cauldron of death that consumed soldiers on both sides at a staggering rate. The fighting there drew comparisons to Verdun and Stalingrad, those infamous meat grinders of the twentieth century where industrial-age warfare reduced human beings to statistics measured in lives-per-meter-gained.

What made Bakhmut unusual was not its strategic importance. There were no major military installations there, no critical crossroads that would unlock eastern Ukraine. The city mattered because both sides decided it mattered, pouring in troops and resources until walking away meant admitting catastrophic losses had been for nothing.

A City Caught in the Crossfire

Bakhmut sits in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, part of the industrial heartland known as the Donbas. The city had already seen conflict once before. In 2014, when pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings across eastern Ukraine following the Euromaidan revolution, they briefly captured parts of Bakhmut, which was then called Artemivsk. Ukrainian special forces and National Guard units expelled them within months, and relative quiet returned.

That peace lasted eight years.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin's stated goal was to "liberate" the entire Donbas region. After failing to capture Kyiv in the north and being pushed back from Kharkiv in the northeast, Russian forces concentrated their efforts on grinding forward in the east. By May 2022, Russian artillery began pounding Bakhmut. One of the first strikes killed five people, including a two-year-old child.

The initial Russian strategy was encirclement. Rather than assault Bakhmut directly, they aimed to trap Ukrainian forces in a pocket by advancing from multiple directions. This approach had worked at Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities to the east that fell in late June and early July 2022 after Ukrainian defenders found their supply lines cut. With those cities captured, the entire Luhansk region was under Russian control, and the battlefield shifted west toward Bakhmut and its neighboring mining town, Soledar.

The Wagner Group Takes the Lead

What made the Battle of Bakhmut distinctive was not the Russian military conducting it. The main assault force consisted primarily of mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private military company with close ties to the Kremlin. Wagner was led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch sometimes called "Putin's chef" because his catering company had won lucrative contracts to feed the Russian military.

Wagner had operated in the shadows for years, fighting in Syria, Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic. But at Bakhmut, the organization stepped into the spotlight. Prigozhin recruited heavily from Russian prisons, offering inmates pardons in exchange for six months of combat service. The catch was brutal: desertion or refusal to fight meant execution, sometimes carried out with sledgehammers in filmed killings meant to deter others.

These convict soldiers became the tip of the spear at Bakhmut. Russian commanders threw wave after wave of them at Ukrainian positions in what soldiers on both sides called "meat assaults." The tactic was grimly simple: send expendable troops forward until they either broke through or revealed Ukrainian defensive positions through the fire that killed them. Regular Russian soldiers and newly mobilized recruits held defensive lines behind the Wagner fighters.

A Ukrainian artilleryman interviewed during the battle described the pattern: Wagner mercenaries led assaults while under-equipped mobilized recruits, derisively called "mobiks," manned the trenches. The human cost was staggering. American military correspondent David Axe reported that by late September 2022, Russia's 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division, a unit with a prewar strength of over 12,000 troops, had been effectively destroyed as a fighting force from casualties sustained around Bakhmut and in the concurrent Kharkiv counteroffensive.

Trench Warfare Returns to Europe

By November 2022, the battle had settled into something that would have been grimly familiar to soldiers a century earlier. The front lines stabilized into a network of trenches, with neither side able to achieve significant breakthroughs. Artillery duels continued around the clock. Hundreds of casualties were reported daily.

The landscape itself transformed. Forests were reduced to splintered stumps. Buildings collapsed into rubble. The main bridge across the Bakhmutka River, which bisects the city, was destroyed by a Russian missile strike in late September, complicating both civilian evacuation and Ukrainian military logistics.

Ukrainian journalist Yurii Butusov described the Russian adaptation in early November. Despite suffering "huge losses every day" since May, Russian forces were adjusting their tactics against increasingly exhausted Ukrainian defenders. Rather than large unit assaults, they concentrated multiple small infantry groups to probe for weak points along narrow sections of the front. When they found a gap, they exploited it. When they were slaughtered, they sent more.

Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine's Eastern Command, called the Bakhmut front "the most bloody, cruel and brutal sector in the Russian-Ukrainian war so far" in early December. In a single day, he reported, Russians had conducted 261 artillery attacks.

A former soldier named Petro Stone, an eyewitness to the battle, offered a simpler description. He called it a "meat grinder," adding that the Russians were "covering Bakhmut with fire 24/7."

Why Did Either Side Keep Fighting?

The question haunted military analysts throughout the battle. Bakhmut had no obvious strategic value proportional to the blood being spilled for it. There were no major military installations, no critical infrastructure beyond some salt and gypsum mines. Taking the city would not unlock any decisive operational advantage for Russia or represent an existential threat to Ukraine if lost.

Yet both sides kept pouring in resources.

For Russia, Bakhmut offered something the military desperately needed after a year of humiliating setbacks: a victory, any victory. After failing to take Kyiv, being driven out of Kharkiv, and withdrawing from Kherson, the Russian high command needed to show progress somewhere. Bakhmut, which Wagner forces were slowly grinding through, became that somewhere.

For Ukraine, abandoning Bakhmut meant admitting that the defenders' sacrifices had been futile. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the city "the fortress of our morale." Every day Ukrainian forces held it was another day of Russian resources consumed, another day of Western attention on Ukrainian resistance, another day of attrition that degraded Russian combat power.

Some Western analysts argued that Ukraine should withdraw to more defensible positions rather than feed troops into what they saw as a pointless battle. But the Ukrainian high command calculated that Russian losses were unsustainable, that the convict soldiers and mobilized recruits being chewed up at Bakhmut represented irreplaceable combat power. If Russia wanted to spend lives taking a ruined city, Ukraine would make them pay dearly for every block.

The Human Cost of Urban Combat

Fighting in cities is the most brutal form of modern warfare. Every building becomes a potential stronghold. Every window might hide a sniper. Every basement could shelter an ambush. The advantages normally enjoyed by attacking forces, particularly armor and air support, are neutralized by the close quarters and vertical terrain of urban environments.

Soldiers of Ukraine's 24th Mechanized Brigade recounted engagements to journalists where they fought running battles with Russian troops dug into treelines, sometimes only a hundred meters apart. Multi-day firefights became common. One described a prolonged engagement against fifty Russian soldiers who had fortified a forest position, requiring days to dislodge them.

The civilians who remained made the situation more complex. By December 2022, over 60 percent of Bakhmut's infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed, according to Donetsk's regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. Yet some residents refused to leave or had no way to evacuate. They survived in basements, supplied by mobile grocery trucks that periodically braved the shelling to enter the city.

One Ukrainian artilleryman made a controversial claim in interviews, alleging that "80 percent" of the remaining civilian population was pro-Russian. Whether accurate or not, the statement illustrated the impossible moral terrain of the battle. These were Ukrainian citizens caught between armies, some perhaps sympathetic to Russia, all of them trapped in hell regardless of their politics.

The Fall of Soledar

While Bakhmut absorbed most of the attention, a parallel battle unfolded twenty kilometers to the north in the mining town of Soledar. The town's name means "salt gift" in Ukrainian, a reference to the extensive salt mines beneath it. Some of these mines extend hundreds of meters underground, creating vast caverns that could theoretically shelter troops or store equipment.

Russian forces captured Soledar by mid-January 2023 after weeks of intense fighting. Wagner Group claimed credit for the victory, and Prigozhin personally visited the town to celebrate. The capture gave Russian forces a northern approach toward Bakhmut and threatened the highway connecting Bakhmut to Ukrainian supply lines in the west.

But Soledar also marked an inflection point in the battle's internal politics. Prigozhin used the victory to publicly criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense, claiming Wagner had done the real fighting while regular military units provided inadequate support. The Russian high command pushed back, asserting that the victory was a joint effort. This public squabbling would escalate dramatically in the months ahead.

The Slow Encirclement

By February 2023, Russian forces had solidified their gains north of Bakhmut and intensified pressure from multiple directions. The New York Times reported increased intensity of attacks on the city and surrounding areas. Ukrainian defenders found themselves being slowly squeezed.

The Russian approach was methodical if costly. They captured villages south and north of the city, gradually cutting off roads and complicating Ukrainian resupply. By late February, they threatened to encircle Bakhmut entirely. Ukrainian forces began withdrawing deeper into the urban core, abandoning the outskirts to concentrate their defenses.

The fighting transformed from trench warfare back into brutal urban combat. Street by street, building by building, Russian forces pushed west. By March 2023, they controlled the eastern half of the city, with the Bakhmutka River serving as an informal front line bisecting Bakhmut.

Ukrainian commanders faced an agonizing decision. Hold Bakhmut and risk losing irreplaceable troops to encirclement, or withdraw and cede the symbolic victory to Russia. They chose to hold, but they also began launching counterattacks on Russia's flanks north and south of the city, seeking to relieve pressure on the defenders within.

Wagner's Victory and Prigozhin's Fury

By late May 2023, Russian forces controlled most of Bakhmut. Ukrainian military officials acknowledged they held only a small strip along the western edge of the city proper. Prigozhin claimed complete victory on May 20th, though Ukrainian forces continued counterattacking on the flanks.

But the victory, such as it was, came at an extraordinary cost. Western estimates suggested Wagner had lost between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters at Bakhmut alone, with Russian regular military casualties adding tens of thousands more. Ukrainian losses were also severe, though Kyiv released no official figures.

More ominously for Moscow, the battle had exposed deep fractures in the Russian command structure. Throughout the fighting, Prigozhin had grown increasingly vitriolic in his public criticism of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. He accused them of starving Wagner of ammunition, of sacrificing his men through incompetence, of caring more about politics than victory.

Around May 25th, Wagner forces began withdrawing from Bakhmut to be replaced by regular Russian troops. Prigozhin was furious, claiming his men had been denied the chance to consolidate their victory. The friction between the mercenary leader and the military establishment had become impossible to ignore.

One month later, in late June 2023, Prigozhin launched an armed mutiny. His forces seized the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and marched toward Moscow before standing down in a murky deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Two months after that, Prigozhin died when his private jet crashed under suspicious circumstances. Russian authorities blamed the crash on pilot error and a grenade explosion, but few observers believed the death was accidental.

The Aftermath

What did Bakhmut's fall actually mean? Militarily, the answer was surprisingly little. Russia had spent nearly a year and suffered perhaps 50,000 or more casualties to capture a small city that opened no significant operational opportunities. Ukrainian forces had been badly bloodied but remained combat-effective and launched their own counteroffensive in June 2023, making gains south of Bakhmut even as the city itself fell.

The Ukrainian counterattacks on Russia's flanks continued through the summer and fall. By September 2023, President Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine would keep fighting to retake Bakhmut. Whether that was realistic or merely rhetorical, the statement underscored that the battle's symbolic importance endured even after the tactical fighting had largely concluded.

Strategically, the battle may have been more consequential for what it revealed about the Russian military. The reliance on convict soldiers and brutal human wave tactics suggested a force struggling to generate quality combat power. The internal feuding between Wagner and the Ministry of Defense exposed command dysfunction at the highest levels. And the ultimate fate of Prigozhin demonstrated how the Kremlin handles those who become too publicly critical, even when they deliver victories.

Lessons in Blood

Military historians will study Bakhmut for decades. The battle offered a laboratory for observing how twenty-first-century armies fight when neither side achieves decisive technological superiority. Drones were omnipresent, allowing both sides to observe enemy positions in real time. Artillery remained the primary killer, raining shells continuously on anything that moved. But ultimately, the fighting came down to infantry in trenches and ruins, killing each other at close range much as their great-grandfathers had at Verdun.

The comparison to World War I was not merely poetic. The static front lines, the daily artillery barrages, the attacks measured in meters gained, the casualties measured in thousands per week, all echoed the Western Front of 1914-1918. Modern technology had changed the tools but not the fundamental dynamic of two evenly matched armies locked in attritional combat.

For Ukraine, Bakhmut proved that its military could absorb massive punishment and keep fighting. For Russia, the battle showed that raw numbers and willingness to accept casualties could eventually overwhelm defensive positions, albeit at costs that would have been unthinkable to most modern military planners.

And for the people of Bakhmut, those who fled and those who died and those who somehow survived in basements as their city crumbled around them, the battle was simply catastrophe. Their home became a name that will appear in history books alongside Verdun and Stalingrad, a synonym for industrialized slaughter that teaches the same lesson those earlier battles taught.

War is waste.