In November, the independent Russian news outlet MediaZona reported that publicly available data from Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service showed a decrease of more than 23,000 people in the total prison population in September and October, the largest of its kind in more than a decade. The biggest downfall.
This suggests that the convicts accepted Prigozhin’s offer. The data could not be independently verified.
Prigozhin warned against expecting rapid successes, and, in a 12 December remark, Wagner’s task in fighting for Bakhmut was “to kill as many enemy troops as possible and bleed the Ukrainian army”.
Footage of the battlefield suggests intense fighting for relatively minor stretches of land, with frontlines shifting back and forth.
In its own battlefield update, Russia said Ukraine suffered heavy losses in men and hardware. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that Bakhmut was the “hottest spot” on the 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) front line.
war of attrition
For Russia, Bakhmut, which it calls Artyomovsk, the city’s Soviet-era name, has long held political value.
Lying on the front line dividing Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, taking Bakhmut would move Russia closer to full control of the Donbass, parts of which have been controlled by a Russian proxy since 2014.
Following Russian troops’ humiliating retreat from Ukraine’s north in April, Moscow publicly changed its original war objective to the “liberation” of the largely Russian-speaking Donbass, of which the Donetsk region makes up about half. .
Polish military analyst Muzyka said that Bakhmut had become a battle of attrition.
“The Ukrainians are just undermining the Russians and it is quite effective in terms of manpower and equipment,” he said. “They’re driving up the cost to the Russians.”
For Moscow, British military intelligence says, “there is a real possibility that the capture of Bakhmut has become primarily a symbolic, political objective”.
A win there would help boost morale and show Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the overall commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine from October 8, was right to redeploy his forces elsewhere after withdrawing from the southern city of Kherson.
It might also boost Prigozhin’s political capital in Moscow if he could take some of the credit for such a victory.
Experts say that for Ukraine, the calculation to hold Bakhmut is partly about maintaining support from Western countries, on whose arms supplies Ukraine’s war effort is dependent.
With Ukraine having achieved a series of battlefield successes, even a relatively insignificant defeat could create a perception of stalemate, which could bolster support for Kyiv amid its growing economic problems stemming from the war. may make Western countries less inclined to expand.