Seeing a Prize, Russia Inundates a Ukraine City With Troops

NYT WORLD: Seeing a Prize, Russia Inundates a Ukraine City With Troops
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Section: World
Source: New York Times
Published Date: January 31, 2023 at 02:00AM

The battle in the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut is growing in importance, as both sides pour forces into the battle.

Russian forces are ratcheting up pressure on the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, pouring in waves of fighters to break Ukraine’s resistance and targeting supply lines in a bloody campaign aimed at securing Moscow’s first significant battlefield victory in months.
Eleven months after Moscow launched its invasion, Bakhmut and the areas around it have become a center of intense fighting, with growing importance as both sides add forces to the battle. Russia intensified its effort to capture Bakhmut, which may be key to seizing the entire Donbas area, after months of bombardment beginning in the summer yielded few gains.
“The situation is very tough,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a recent nightly address after meeting with military leaders. He said, “There are constant attempts to break through our defense.”
Over the course of the war, firepower has proved critical to Russian gains, but the battle for Bakhmut has been different.
Increasingly, Ukrainian fighters and analysts say, Moscow has been relying on a cruder tactic: trying to tip the city into its win column through the sheer weight of troop numbers. As a result, the Ukrainians say, Russian casualties in recent fighting in Bakhmut have been higher than in previous months.
Part of Russia’s evolving strategy appears to be to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses with waves of soldiers, many drawn from President Vladimir V. Putin’s call-up of 300,000 men in September. That would be a departure from Moscow’s summer campaigns elsewhere in the Donbas, when artillery pounded cities for weeks before Russia launched a sustained ground offensive.
In Bakhmut, Ukraine, too, has suffered heavy casualties. But the calculation for each side is not the same.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-bakhmut.html

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