Just weeks before President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visited the city of Bakhmut in December, a soldier with the military call sign “Bear” stared out the window of a destroyed sixth-floor apartment overlooking the city’s eastern reaches. I quietly stood next to him. The battle below unfolded in muted ferocity.
Rockets lit up the sky. A tank burned in the distance. To the south, Russian incendiaries floated down, the thin arc of white flame igniting small fires on the ground, but little else. There was nothing left to burn, the area already bombarded to what seemed like oblivion.
“Bakhmut,” I wrote in my diary, “is in bad shape.”
That was a long night of hundreds, as Bakhmut became the focus of some of the fiercest fighting of the war – the object of acute longing for Russia and of stubborn defense by Ukraine. And now the city of Bakhmut seems to have fallen to the Russians after 10 months of fierce fighting, with thousands of soldiers wounded or killed, and a lingering question: how did an unremarkable city the world had never heard of become the place where both sides decided to fight to the end, regardless of the cost?
“Looks like all the vultures are here,” one soldier messaged me as crowds of journalists turned up as the city appeared to be on the brink of collapse in March. “Where were you before it got this bad?”
The trajectory of a war is unknowable. Combatants, political winds and military strategy have an equal say in the battle and the violence that follows. Bakhmut, a former Cossack outpost that was a salt mining town at the start of the war, happened to be the site where two armies clashed. Pride, rebelliousness and sheer stubbornness soon gave the city extraordinary importance.
Falluja, in Iraq, was unknown to much of the world until the United States attempted to quell a growing insurgency in 2004. There were two separate battles for the city, one lasting three weeks, the other six. They were intense but much smaller than the destruction and loss of Bakhmut.
Gettysburg was a rolling landscape of hills and fields typical of Southern Pennsylvania, but it happened to be where three days of futile fighting destroyed Robert E. Lee’s prospects of turning the Civil War to his advantage. Iwo Jima was little more than a crust of a Pacific island, but the US needed it for long-range bombers, and the struggle to control it became one of the most grueling battles of World War II.
But whether it’s Bakhmut, Iwo Jima, or Falluja, the end of the battle, no matter the stakes or the winner, is always the same: an unfathomable loss and a reckoning with what comes next. How do you remember the dead and prepare for what you fear will be the calculated indifference of your leaders, plotting their next campaigns, with battles that could lead to your own downfall?
“‘The enemy,'” said Yossarian, Joseph Heller’s character, in his World War II novel “Catch-22,” “is anyone who will get you killed, no matter what side they’re on.”
On Monday morning, Ukrainian officials talked about controlling the “suburbs” of Bakhmut and preparing operations on the flanks, a subtle indication that fighting in the city had come to an end. Amidst the rubble, the pre-war population of about 70,000 has shrunk to a few thousand or less.
The Russian conquest of Bakhmut at one point seemed unlikely. The Ukrainian army had pushed the Russians away from Kharkiv last September. In November, the port city of Kherson was liberated. Ukraine was winning. Some in Bakhmut hoped that Kiev’s troops would continue to advance and turn the tide once and for all.
But despite their defeats elsewhere, Moscow forces, along with the Wagner mercenaries, the Kremlin-backed group that led the assault on Bakhmut, continued to attack the city.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made it clear that his forces would capture Bakhmut and then target the entire mineral-rich Donbas region in which it is located. There was no winter lull as the ground hardened and the metal holes of howitzers and Kalashnikovs became painful to the touch with numb fingers from the cold. Spring only brought more destruction in fierce and bloody street-to-street fighting.
Military analysts, Western officials and the media debated Bakhmut’s “strategic significance” for months, as if some military jargon would make it easier to endure the loss of an entire city to an invading army. Russians could make better use of their resources, analysts said. Ukraine must retreat to better ground and continue its offensive elsewhere, they added.
I remember the pundits and the press back in 2010 when I fought in another battle as a naval infantryman in southern Afghanistan – the battle of Marja. It wasn’t nearly as violent as what I saw on my many trips to Bakhmut as a journalist for DailyExpertNews, but like the Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their city, I knew the world was watching.
How little that meant in 2010, where no public scrutiny would determine whether my friends lived or died. And how little it meant to the soldiers fighting in Bakhmut, where every minute that went unfired or attacked was a welcome reprieve, and the purpose of each day was to survive and keep each other alive.
Mr. Zelensky turned Bakhmut into the official focal point of the war when he visited in December, appearing with his war-weary soldiers in what appeared to be an empty factory at the front. The speed bump of a city formerly called Artemivsk was in the spotlight.
Bakhmut, with its once well-mown hiking trails and a quaint and well-known winery, was suddenly of strategic importance, whether the generals and analysts agreed or not.
Mr. Zelensky’s visit was all the media and the Ukrainian people needed. “Bakhmut Holds” became a rallying cry. The war had another decisive battle, one eerily similar to the siege of Mariupol and the battles in Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk months before: defenders outnumbered, fighting against a much larger army.
We are “completely surrounded by fire,” said a soldier who fought near the end of the battle in Bakhmut, before asking if The Times would give the correct information to the public if left there.
Facing Mr. Zelensky was Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, Wagner’s head. The once secretive tycoon started appearing in videos on the Bakhmut front. The footage shows Mr. Prigozhin gathering his fighters and attacking Mr. Zelensky while adjusting his body armor. In a video posted in March, Mr Prigozhin asked the Ukrainian president to keep sending “battle-ready units” for his Wagner troops to kill them.
He also floundered with the Russian military leadership, berating and mocking them, adding a larger-than-life character to the Bakhmut story.
It was a camera-ready match, enhanced by the gruesome images that also came from the front.
Videos posted from the battlefield showed a scarred landscape, dotted with shattered trees. Soldiers fought from muddy trenches in knee-high water. Trench foot was rampant during the winter.
Bakhmut was quickly compared to Verdun in 1916 (a 10-month battle that left hundreds of thousands of French and German casualties). But bloody trench warfare in eastern Ukraine was nothing new, as it had been a staple of the conflict since Russian-backed separatists there began battling the government in 2014.
And the historical comparisons, appropriate as they were, did not detract from the horrors on the ground. For months, Ukraine’s dead and wounded poured into Bakhmut’s lonely hospital. Blood-stained stretchers welcomed new patients. The dead fields of Russia were littered with camouflaged corpses pointing in the direction of their attack.
Mr. Zelensky’s visit had made it clear: his forces would fight to the end. Bakhmut would join the list of cities where many soldiers died in exchange for just a few miles of devastated land.
Those soldiers who live will have to spend the rest of their lives thinking if it was worth it. And those who died will be remembered as the fallen heroes of the battle of Bakhmut, the ranks who met their end in a city many people had never heard of a year ago.
Standing by the shattered window that freezing December night, I remember thinking that despite the crescendo of artillery and the rattle of gunfire, the battle for Bakhmut felt far away. Two days later, a grenade crashed into the empty apartment we had been in.
Now the Russians are patrolling the city. The war continues. It will crawl to new places on the map, undestroyed by months of artillery battles, where new slogans may appear and where “strategic meaning” is up for debate, as the world awaits another bloody finale.
