start an traoù ba'r gêr harzoù

 

The situation around Bakhmut is quite compound/complex and takes some unraveling.

1. You are correct that Bakhmut has no military significance. There is nothing to be gained from occupying it. It does not control any high ground or GLCs or anything else of military significance.
2. The Russian MoD assigned a huge symbolic value to Bakhmut because they felt confident of taking it in a few days and they badly needed a “victory” because they has been constantly retreating since March 2022. It is hard to convince people you are winning without any victories.
3. The Russians and Wagners attacked Bakhmut for over a year and never really fully captured it. OVER A YEAR! And they took around 100,000 casualties in the process.
4. The Wagners alone lost about 25,000 or half its troops. And since the Russians were not able to cleanly capture the town, friction developed between the Russian troops and the Wagner troops as each blamed the other for the failure to capture the town. Eventually this broke into open warfare with the Russians firing 30 missiles at a Wagner assembly point, killing or seriously wounding well over 2,000 of them.
5. The Russians chose to make Bakhmut a war of attrition. The Ukrainians chose to stand and oppose them because the attrition numbers were lopsidedly in favor of the Ukrainians —- over 30:1 in some battles.
6. The Ukrainians never really had to go after Bakhmut because they had constructed at least two reinforced and fortified lines of defense in their immediate rear. If drive out of Bakhmut, they would just fall back to the defensive lines and it would start afresh for the Russians.
7. With the Wagners in mutiny and the Russian troops shifting around to fill gaps, the Russians are creating new weak spots and gaps around Bakhmut. The Ukraine is exploiting these gaps and is moving against the northern and southern suburbs of Bakhmut. An encirclement is becoming more and more likely.
8. Part of the effort at Bakhmut is possible to keep Russian troops pinned there so that they cannot be shifted to oppose the Ukrainian offensive in other fronts.
9. The Ukrainians continue to be active around Bakhmut because they obviously perceive the Russians to be weak there.
10. This is the earliest stage of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. On all fronts the Ukrainians are conducting probing and reconnaissance in force. This is to determine where the weakest and most porous spots in the Russian MLR are located. Bakhmut is a center of activity because there are a lot of Russian troops there. But other than that, it has no significance.
11. The counteroffensive has not yet begun. We know this because the Ukrainian “super brigades” are not committed on any front. These are the troops with the best training, the most experience and the best western weapons. When they are committed, we will know about it. Bakhmut is just a side show.