For all the carnage of the battle for Bakhmut and destruction caused by Russia’s latest missile strikes on Ukraine, they still feel like a prelude to a bigger spring storm.
Western officials believe that about 200,000 Russian fighters have been killed and injured in their country’s year-long invasion, and they put Ukraine’s losses at about half that number. The struggle for Bakhmut may be the bloodiest of the war, with tens of thousands killed and Nato sources estimating that five Russian soldiers are dying there for every Ukrainian killed, as waves of Moscow’s troops attack the well-fortified positions of Kyiv’s forces in the ruins of the city.
Each side says it is fighting not only for control of a useful road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, but also to inflict maximum damage on the enemy and reduce the manpower, arms and ammunition it has available for its spring offensive. It is a week since Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group that is leading Russia’s assault on Bakhmut, publicly warned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the “pincers are closing” on the city and urged him to withdraw his troops.
Yet Zelenskiy and his top generals subsequently agreed to send reinforcements to Bakhmut, and the commander of Ukrainian ground forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said “the importance of holding Bakhmut is constantly growing” because it buys time for Kyiv to “prepare for future offensive operations” and “the enemy loses the most prepared and combat-capable part of his army – Wagner’s assault troops.”
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When Russia fired more than 80 missiles at Ukrainian cities on Thursday, killing at least 11 people, its defence ministry claimed to have “disrupted the deployment of reserves and…foreign-made armaments and knocked out capacities for the repair of military hardware and the production of ammunition.”
For the first time, Russia used six of its expensive and scarce hypersonic Kinzhal rockets in one strike, which some believe showed Moscow digging deep into its missile stocks to urgently degrade Ukraine’s attack potential.
Ukraine is now receiving new air defence systems, ammunition, tanks and other armour from western allies, while drawing up final plans for a spring offensive that may aim to punch through Russia’s lines in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, isolating its troops in neighbouring Kherson province and breaking its land link to occupied Crimea. Zelenskiy says he wants to win the war this year, knowing time may erode western support for Ukraine – and favour Russia with its vast manpower and industrial capacity.
Both sides hope the coming months will deliver a decisive breakthrough, but their second spring of full-scale war is unlikely to be the last.
