In Bakhmout, the front line has moved less than 10 km in 3 years

The battle for Bakhmout, a town in Donbass which had 70,000 inhabitants before the war, remains to this day one of the bloodiest of the war in Ukraine. Up to 30,000 Russian fighters and several thousand Ukrainian soldiers are believed to have been killed between July 2022 and May 20, 2023, when Wagner’s former leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin – who died a few months later in a mysterious plane crash – announced the capture of the city.

Three years after the fall of Bakhmut, the Russian army had only advanced 10 kilometers westward.

• The Kremlin had presented the fall of the city as a “major historical victory”, claiming that it would open the way to the capture of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, two strongholds located a few dozen kilometers to the northwest.
• Prigozhin himself highlighted the “disposable infantry” technique used by Russia for several months, which consisted of sending waves of soldiers on the Ukrainian defenses in order to identify their firing positions.
• Within Wagner, several veterans who survived the battle were awarded a medal which bore the inscription: “Bakhmut’s meat grinder”.

The strategy used by the Russian army and by Wagner at Bakhmout opened a new phase in the war, marked by cycles of attrition which concerned soldiers, artillery ammunition, armored vehicles, then missiles and drones. If the Russian army continues to suffer considerable human losses – of the order of 25 to 35,000 men per month – the omnipresence of drones has made impossible the infantry assaults used by Moscow in Bakhmout or Avdiivka, 50 kilometers to the southwest.

The distance that separates the front lines in the Bakhmut sector three years apart testifies to the impasse in which the Russian army finds itself in Ukraine.

• Maps from the Deep State network of Ukrainian analysts show that it was located on May 20, 9.5 kilometers to the west, in the town of Chassiv Yar.
• À Paris, cela correspond à la distance qui sépare La Défense de l’ÃŽle de la Cité ; à Madrid, the Retiro park on the western edge of Casa de Campo; à Berlin, le château de Charlottenburg d’East Side Gallery.
• If the area which separates the two cities is unanimously recognized as being under Russian control, Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes regularly target Russian vehicles and units.

Since the capture of Bakhmout, the Russian army has failed to progress significantly towards the fortresses of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and is still struggling to encircle Kostiantynivka, a town located about forty kilometers northeast of Pokrovsk.

• During Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing, a few days before Vladimir Putin went there, Xi Jinping told the American president that Putin “may end up regretting his invasion of Ukraine.”.
• China is one of the key supporters of the war led by Moscow, alongside North Korea, particularly through the export of dual-use goods.