how Russia and Ukraine have insisted on prolonging the bloodiest and most absurd battle

The fight for Bakhmut made all the sense in the world in June, in July and maybe in August. The fight for Bakhmut became, in fact, a symbol. On the Ukrainian side, the symbol of resistance the wall that refused to fall. On the Russian side, the symbol of the power of the Wagner Group and its owner, Eugeni Prigozhin. Determined to wage an internal war against the leaders of the Ministry of Defense and, in particular, against Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, Prigozhin sent his best men to take a city that, in his opinion, could unbalance the war and thus win him all kinds of honors in the eyes of Vladimir Putin.

From that, we already say, six months ago. Six months of bombing, destruction and death. It is impossible to calculate how many men have fallen in the battle of Bakhmut, but they number in the thousands. The Russian attacks are launched by waves of infantry: men and men who are delivered to the crusher with the sole objective of finally exhausting the Ukrainian defense. Without electricity, without gas and without drinking water, many of the inhabitants of this almost ghost town refuse to leave what remains of their homes. They already suffered the war in 2014 and they believe they will be able to start again in 2023.

[Putin cancela su rueda de prensa anual mientras lucha por ‘desatascar’ a su ejército del este de Ucrania]

The empty symbol

Everything could change for these inhabitants of Bakhmut when, after the summer, the Russian Kharkov front sank. The Ukrainian advance on Liman made it possible to secure the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk axis, threaten Kreminna-Svatove and, above all, seek an alternative to Bakhmut as a center of operations. In principle, that should have released the pressure on the city. Russia needed to defend other territories -for example, the north of Kherson, which fell after a few weeks- and influencing the capture of a city that was already strategically irrelevant was absurd.

However, neither Prigozhin, nor Putin, nor Surovikin have wanted to give in their efforts. Bakhmut must fall. If in the summer, the justification was geographical and material, in the autumn it was purely emotional: Russian public opinion must be offered a triumph however possible amid so much failure… and perhaps they thought that Ukraine would drop the piece, precisely because it was not going for it either. already a lot in it. If they had withdrawn from Sievierodonetsk, their great capital of Lugansk, how could they not from Bakhmut?

But no, he didn’t either. Ukraine sent more and more men to defend the square, simply to deny Putin that symbolic victory and, above all, not to give up the initiative in the war. kyiv’s top brass believe that the possible capture of Bakhmut could upset the current status quo in which Ukraine appears to be on the offensive while Russia resigns itself to defending what little it has left of what it conquered last spring.

Besides, it is insisted that, in this way, Russian forces are depleting, both in the form of human losses and wasted ammunition. The more time the Wagner Group mercenaries – much of it already ex-convicts and fortune seekers – spend fighting for an empty target, the less they help reinforce the strategic locations that really count, both in Donetsk and west of the Dnieper River.

[Sydorenko, jefe militar en Járkov: “¿Qué se siente al matar?: O yo le mato a él, o él me mata a mí”]

The role of propaganda in chaos

The problem with that narrative is that it works both ways. The two armies claim to be weakening the opponent and probably both are right. From Moscow it is already recognized that the objective is not so much to advance in its conquest of Donbas as to decimate the Ukrainian army, appealing to the original claim of February of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine. However, all the reports from the area point to a bloodletting by precisely the Russian side, which attacks with a ratio of eight or nine men to one and, therefore, presents a equivalent number of casualties.

Now, we cannot be too sure of what happens in Bakhmut because, as in any war and even more so in a symbolic enclave, misinformation and propaganda fill everything. Social networks wake up every morning with euphoric pro-Russian messages that ensure that the city is about to fall and that its troops have managed to advance decisively and go to bed with messages from pro-Ukrainian accounts that ensure that all attacks have been repulsed and that progress, if any, is minimal.

It is very complicated for the impartial spectator know exactly what is going on there. Determine the number of casualties for each side, establish the specific location of each army and, above all, resolve what can happen if one or the other army ends up taking the victory. If Bakhmut falls into Russian hands, can one expect the start of an offensive towards Sloviansk or would it just be a triumph for the gallery, an excuse to hang Russian flags on half-ruined buildings and then upload the photos on Telegram?

In turn, if Bakhmut holds out, at what price will he? Is it paying off Ukraine to concentrate troops there and rack up casualties, or should it hand over the city and retreat to safer positions to retrieve it laterHow did you do with Limán? We lack too much data to make a sensible judgment on this. In the last twenty-four hours, it has been published that the russians are already on the outskirts of the citythreatening the peripheral neighborhoods, and, at the same time, that an entire unit of the Wagner Group has been eliminated thanks to the bombardment of its barracks.

What both news have in common are destruction and horror. Deaths on one side and deaths on the other. The details are the ones that escape us and are the ones that would give context to the situation. Bakhmut hold on, yes, but Does Ukraine know what it is doing by resisting at any cost? Does Russia know the risks of a suicide operation like this just to give one of its bigwigs a political treat? When everything is confusion, information becomes propaganda. And about propaganda it is very difficult to make conjectures.