Bakhmut: the sector of the front where Russia is still attacking
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At the end of the eighth month of the war, the Russian armed forces became part of the defending and retreating army in the northeastern and southwestern sectors of the front. But there is an area where they continue to attack. This is Bahmut.
The city shudders from shell explosions. Artogbstrel goes for several months, day and night.
Most of the 70,000 inhabitants of Bakhmut fled. The rest were mostly old people. There is no water in the city, no electricity either.
A handful of inhabitants, lined up, waiting for the next evacuation. Volunteers take people out on a minibus, fearlessly shuttle between the front-line city and the rear.
One of the evacuees is Elena. She is almost 70 years old.
“People are very tired,” she says under the roar of regular explosions. It’s very hard, Elena says, when you have to cook on a fire and carry buckets of water.
“Damn the one who started this war! Damn him a hundred times!” Elena sighs.
As she climbs onto the bus, she folds her hands, thankful for the volunteers and the misfortune that she can finally get out of here.
Bakhmut is one of the dangerous places where the Russians do not retreat and do not defend, but, on the contrary, they attack. Progress is very slow and costly, but it is progress nonetheless.
In early July, there was some logic in the fact that the Russians concentrated on Bakhmut. Before that, they took Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, and Bakhmut was to become a key city, and then the Russian army would go to Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.
But that was before the September lightning-fast arrival of Ukrainians in the Kharkiv region. The threat from the north to Kramatorsk and Slavyansk has been eliminated, the conventional artillery of the Russians will no longer reach them, and in general the Russian army was forced to go on the defensive because of the offensive.
Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty, press attache of the operational command “Vostok” of the Ukrainian army, doubts that Russia will have the strength and equipment to finally take Bakhmut. Much, in his opinion, depends on how much manpower and what quality Russia can mobilize.
“So far, we see that the quality is low, and they don’t have weapons,” Colonel Cherevaty says. According to him, Russia is sending 1960s T-62 tanks to the front because most of its new equipment has already been destroyed.
True, the suburbs of Bakhmut are being stormed mainly not by the army, but by the private military company Wagner Group.
So after all, can the Russians take Bakhmut as human? And if so, what’s next?
“When we retreated from Lisichansk, we exhausted the enemy,” says Colonel Cherevaty. He suggests that the same thing could happen with Bakhmut.