In an earlier phase of the war, Ukraine’s leadership had been more equivocal about pitched battles like Bakhmut. President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a rare moment of public self-doubt, mulled thenwhether the deaths of about 100 Ukrainian soldiers per day in Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk were worth the fight for two already ruined cities.
But this time, there has been no second-guessing. And new research suggests the lethal urban combat last summer was not as senseless as it might have seemed at the time.
An analysis by two leading military analysts published last month by the Foreign Policy Research Institute vindicated the attritional fighting. The pitched battle weakened the Russian Army enough for two Ukrainian counterattacks in the fall to succeed…Those offensives, in the Kharkiv region in the north and Kherson in the south, delivered two of the most embarrassing defeats of the war to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“The amount of ammunition Russia expended and the casualties they took set up the Russian Army for failure.”
