Reports from on the ground tell of increasingly brutal fighting for the town of Bakhmut, also known as Artyomovsk, roughly 65 km north of Donetsk city. According to these accounts, Russian forces are aiming at encircling the town while inflicting as many casualties on Ukrainian troops as possible.
The Russian Defense Ministry, in its Dec. 4 daily update, reported that “Russian troops are carrying out successful offensive actions near Artyomovsk (Bakhmut).” Imagery coming out of the Ukrainian trenches and posted on Telegram in recent days has been compared to Verdun in 1916. “The Ukrainian commander of the Svoboda battalion, Petro Kuzyk, whose unit is one of those holding Bakhmut said his soldiers are staying in trenches full of corpses, fighting in extremely cold conditions and in knee-deep water against Russia’s attacks,” reported the Express tabloid of London. Asked about casualties, “They are colossal. They don’t even count bodies,” Kuzyk said. “The fields, the woods in front of the positions are all littered with corpses. I watched them: They dragged their people back to bury them, take off their warm sweaters, and start to put it on themselves. But, nevertheless, each assault group has a grenade launcher, a machine gunner, and their machine guns more or less perform their tasks. They have herds.”
Yalensis, author of the Awful Avalanche blog, cites Russian military analysts saying that Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and the agglomeration of villages around it is key to all of the central Donetsk front and the battle to control it may end up being one of the most decisive of the war. “If we are able to take this agglomeration, then the territory of D.P.R. will be factually entirely liberated from the Occupiers,” he writes. This will also solve the water problem, as the Kiev regime forces had cut off the supply of water to Donbass via the Seversky Donetsk canal in February and no alternative could be found.
According to an updated post on the Intel Slava Z Telegram channel, this morning, Ukrainian forces continue to suffer heavy casualties in the Artyomovsk direction. “Ukrainian generals throw everyone into battle indiscriminately—there are national battalions, and militants trained abroad, and foreign [private military companies] PMCs. The situation is equally deplorable for everyone,” the update says. “Last night, our artillery effectively worked on Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut, Soledar and Kleshcheevka.
“Against this background, the rhetoric of official Kiev began to change. Artyomovsk is gradually turning from a ‘fortress of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’ into a ‘city of no strategic importance.’”
