Bakhmut 2023: More Than Just A Meat-Grinder

After the Russian Retreat from Kherson, Ukraine became engaged in the battle of Bakhmut which lasted until it was captured on may 20th 2023. But the Russian assault on Bakhmut began at the same time as Russia began building defensive lines. This marked a shift in the Russian strategy in the war as they went from an expedition force to get a peace agreement guaranteeing neutrality, to a war time force seeking to destroy the Ukrainian army through attrition and defend its newly annexed territories in southern Ukraine. But to conduct that switch, the Russians needed to buy time and create a diversion to allow them to spend months and billions of rubles building up the defensive lines for the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive which began on 4th June 2023. So Bakhmut was a strategy initiated by General Surovikin and Evgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin admitted in his essay entitled "only a fair fight; no agreement" that Bakhmut was a meat grinder trap set up to induce the Ukrainian army into funnelling more men into a trap. He said that Ukrainian troops ear-marked for the counteroffensive ended up being committed to Bakhmut where Ukraine lost both lives and territory. Even Ukrainian generals like General Krovonos said that he wanted to pull out of Bakhmut since February 2023 yet Zelensky's ego did not allow it. But it's clear that Bakhmut served another purpose. It provided the necessary distraction to allow the Russian army time to hire civilian contractor firms with excavators to build these massive and intricate defence lines. Bakhmut therefore was similar to Kyiv: it served two purposes, one more obvious and another more secretive. Both were diversions, distractions or what is known as maskirovka.