"Ukrainians should have pulled back weeks ago. It just doesn’t make sense to defend the city right now," says Poland-based defense analyst Konrad Muzyka.
His opinion reflects the "growing splits between officials in Kyiv and some Western military analysts" over Ukraine's decision to dig in and defend the heavily bombarded, already bombed-out city of Bakhmut, reports NBC News. "A number of observers have questioned whether Kyiv's decision to reinforce the area rather than retreat is being driven more by the political desire to avoid a high-profile defeat than by military logic."
President Zelensky pledged weeks ago to hold Bakhmut at any cost. Later, the Ukrainian leadership seemed to back away from that decision. Then reinforcements were sent; whether to double down or aid in a withdrawal, nobody knew. Now it's apparent they were deployed to continue Bakhmut's costly defense — the bloodiest of the war, and its outcome, possibly the linchpin of all future Ukrainian maneuvers.
Zelensky and his top military advisers still argue that defending Bakhmut is their military's better option. They insist the battle is costing Russia's military unacceptable losses in manpower and munitions and, furthermore, is buying time for the Ukrainian military's reserves to prepare their counteroffensive. The unconcealable difficulty in the leadership's argument is the unacceptable losses in Ukrainian manpower and munitions.
Washington also insists that it's supportive of Ukraine's strategy. "Ukraine has fixed the Russian forces at that city, and they're exacting very heavy costs on the Wagner Group and the Russian regular military," says the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. If one is inclined to diplomatic cynicism, one might reason this is more bilateral public relations than military opinion.
Washington is not alone in its avowed support. "The idea of the Ukrainians is not just to kill as many Russians as possible, but to fix their troops there so they cannot deploy them anywhere else," says Rajan Menon of Defense Priorities, a U.S. think tank. "The question is," he continues, "can [you] hold the line and inflict damage with a cost that the commanders in Ukraine deem as acceptable?" That is, indeed, the whole of the question.
A fascinating tangent of the debate is offered by Tatiana Stanovaya, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She agues that Moscow is not only counting on Ukraine to defend the city at a high cost to itself, but to cost Yevgeny Prigozhin's paramilitary Wagner Group terminal losses. "It’s useful that Ukrainians decide to stay," says Stanovaya, "because like this they will just waste all Wagner’s people." Prigozhin — a possible threat to Vladimir Putin's power — would then drift into political obscurity.
In fact, Wagner may already be headed for permanent decline. The Institute for the Study of War reported Wednesday that "The overall Wagner Group offensive on Bakhmut ... appears to be nearing culmination..... Prigozhin has recently emphasized the toll that a reported lack of ammunition is having on Wagner’s ability to pursue offensives on Bakhmut and stated on March 15 that [it's] due to ammunition shortages and heavy fighting."
Russia, however, can still throw tens of thousands of sacrificial non-Wagnerites into the fight. I'm hesitant to cite the opinion of neocon John Bolton. Nevertheless, yesterday, in an NBC interview, he made the ultimately valid point: Russia, he noted, has a 3:1 advantage over Ukraine in population, and thus has far more available manpower to draw on. "Do the math," he said, implying an ultimately ruinous disadvantage for Ukraine.
This war, in its entirety, might well hinge on the outcome in Bakhmut, since Ukraine's nation-saving counteroffensive hinges on it. One can only hope that President Zelensky and his military advisers know what they're doing — and that the West's nettlesome, dissident analysts have it all wrong.