Ukraine series: the battle for Bakhmut

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Ukraine series: the battle for Bakhmut?’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week will mark a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. In the last of our series of podcasts on the Ukraine war, I’m talking to the FT’s correspondent in Kyiv, Christopher Miller. Chris first arrived in Ukraine in 2010 as a volunteer teacher. He was posted to the town of Bakhmut in the east of the country. That town has now become the centre of one of the most brutal battles of this war. Both Russia and Ukraine have promised new offensives for the spring. So is the war entering a decisive phase?

Joe Biden
You and all Ukrainians, Mr President, remind the world every single day what the meaning of the word courage is. From all sectors of your economy, all walks of life — it’s astounding, astounding — remind us that freedom is priceless, it’s worth fighting for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re gonna be with you, Mr. President. For as long as it takes. (We’ll do it)

Gideon Rachman
That was President Joe Biden speaking in Kyiv earlier this week. His visit was a striking gesture of solidarity from the United States towards Ukraine. The US president brought with him promises of new forms of weaponry, including tanks, missiles and armoured vehicles. But the Ukrainians are still pressing for fighter planes and longer-range missiles. They hope to make a decisive breakthrough in the next few months. So when I got Chris Miller on the line from Kyiv, I started by asking him how he expects the war to unfold over the coming months.

Christopher Miller
You know, I think we’ve been in a strange state now for several months where there hasn’t been a lot of movement on or across the frontline, which is predominantly in the south and the east. If you remember, there was this major Ukrainian offensive in the autumn where the Ukrainians regained a lot of ground outside of Kherson in the south and over in Kharkiv in the east. And since then, the lines really have solidified, no matter what the Russians have done, throwing tens of thousands of newly mobilised soldiers at the fight, bringing in these mercenaries from the Wagner group that haven’t really been able to penetrate Ukrainian lines and push beyond the front line that they’ve held now for several months. And so there’s been this heavy missile bombardment since October. And, you know, it’s gone on, for now, several months. And the idea at least what it seems to be on the Russian side was that, OK, if we can’t beat the Ukrainians on the front line, we’ll bring up these mobilised soldiers, train them up and get ready for a late-winter or early-spring offensive, which would bring us to around this time and in the meantime we’ll freeze out the Ukrainians by using these missiles to knock out power infrastructure, turn off the lights, turn off the heating, cut off the water supplies and make life just totally unbearable for Ukrainians.

But that hasn’t really happened. I think that has surprised quite a few people, you know, not necessarily the resilience of the Ukrainians, which we’ve come to know all too well over the last year, but the fact that I think the Ukrainians’ air defence systems have continued to work very successfully, that they’ve gotten these new air defence systems from their western partners, that has certainly helped. And because of that, we’ve seen this sort of stalemate. I think if you talk to Ukrainian intelligence like I did last week or you listen to analysts who are watching very closely, this Russian winter/spring offensive has already begun. It’s been under way now for a couple of weeks, but it hasn’t made much progress. I guess to come back to your original question, what are we gonna see over the next months? I think Ukraine really sees a window of opportunity where it can try its hand at regaining some of the ground that it has lost. The goal, of course, is to liberate all of the territory that is under Russian occupation and that has been captured by Russia in the last year, but not only. Kyiv has been very outspoken about its ultimate goal to recapture all of the Donbas, those territories in eastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied since 2014, as well as the Crimean peninsula. So the goal this year is to regain everything.

Gideon Rachman
So the picture you portray of the Ukrainians is, despite everything, reasonably upbeat. Is it something of a surprise that this Russian spring offensive or winter offensive, I guess February, has not really got as far as people wanted and are we confident that this is all the Russians have? That was sort of what the British defence secretary suggested when he was talking to the FT in Munich. He said, “you know, this is it, they can’t do much more.” Is that your impression?

Christopher Miller
Yes and no. The Russian offensive has, I think it’s safe to say, at least at this point, fallen flat. Without a significant influx of troops or bringing in a significant increase of weapons and throwing all it has at the fight, I don’t think they’re going to advance any further than they currently are. I mean, they’ve been trying to capture the city of Bakhmut since last May, and really in the last few months, they’ve scaled up their offensive there and they still haven’t had much luck. They’ve taken some little towns and villages around the city, but those are very sparsely populated anyway. It’s open terrain, it’s not that difficult to capture these little villages along some of the highways there. So they haven’t had a lot of success. I think one of the concerns is that they have deeper resources, they have more ammunition than the Ukrainians have. And so if this becomes a game of who can fight the longest, then Russia may have the upper hand. It’s just going to have deeper resources, certainly more people, if Putin decides to announce another wave of mobilisation. The Ukrainians are being largely supplied by the west at this point. They’ve almost completely expended their entire weapons cache of Soviet-era arms and ammunition, and they really need a massive influx of western weaponry and ammunition to continue the fight. And so if this is a war that drags on beyond the spring and the summer and even beyond 2023 into 2024, it’s going to become a battle of endurance. And at that point, the big question will be how long is the west able and willing to continue backing Ukraine in this fight?

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, the Russian tactics have been, some people compared them to the first world war. These wave tactics, expending huge numbers of soldiers and lives in Bakhmut, a town that you know very well. I mean, you used to work there and you’ve been up there during the fighting. It must be tragic to see the destruction of the place that you lived and worked in.

Christopher Miller
It is. You know, I’m American. I’m not Ukrainian but I did move to Ukraine in 2010, and I lived in Bakhmut when it was still called Artemivsk for two years. And I made a lot of very close friends there. I worked in the city’s schools and library and with some NGOs there. and so I know the place very well, I know what kind of place it became over the last decade. And there was a lot of promise and there were a lot of really incredibly smart young people. And it was a vibrant little city. And when I returned this summer and then again in October and December, it was almost completely destroyed and a shell of its former self. And this is a city of more than 70,000 people, maybe 80,000 people even. And now there’s maybe 5,000 people — it was a ghost town. My whole department had a giant artillery shell hole in it. The city roads were all torn up. There was just debris everywhere. And that was all the evidence of this really brutal fight that has been waged there over the past several months. The Ukrainians are doing everything they can to hold on, but what they’re facing are, like you said, these waves of fighters that the Russians are sending in. And it is very much a World War I-style battle. It’s just, it’s gruelling.

Gideon Rachman
And presumably the children you taught and friends you made have been scattered all over the country or outside Ukraine and perhaps some of them killed in the fighting.

Christopher Miller
Yeah, unfortunately, some of them have lost their lives, some earlier on in the fight in 2014 and 15 when the war first broke out. I had some former students of mine who had been killed by landmines over the years. And in the past year, I’ve discovered that some of my former students had joined the fight after February 24th and are serving in various units of the Ukrainian military now. One student of mine, who was 16 when I met him, he was a senior in high school, is now in his, I guess, later 20s, and he’s a military medic who just underwent training to train new military medics. And he’s been on the front lines in eastern Ukraine for all of this year. And we talk pretty regularly about just how intense it is and how important it is to him to be a part of this fight and how his mother is very proud of him, but not a big fan of him being so close to the battles. And, you know, she had lost her husband a few years back and all that she has left is him. His name is Bogdan. And he feels it’s really important to do this. So there are people like him who I know who are very much a part of the fight. Others are fighting in other ways — part of the volunteer organisations that are raising money for supplies, things like drones or medical equipment. Others have joined the United Nations or other humanitarian organisations to help provide food, shelter or those types of things to people. But almost everyone I know is involved in some way now. This war has mobilised all of Ukrainian society, and even those who fled to safety in western Ukraine or in Europe are finding a way, you know, to help their home and are still holding out hope that they can return to some semblance of normalcy in the not-so-distant future.

Gideon Rachman
Now, a lot of what Russia has argued from the beginning, continues to argue is that, that area in the east of Ukraine, that a lot of people there actually they’re Russian speakers, they look to Russia, they don’t look to Kyiv. Did that sentiment exist? Do traces of it still exist? Was this a divided society?

Christopher Miller
Well, I’m not sure if I would use the word divided, but I would say people had various loyalties. When I first moved there, what I found was a really strong regional identity. This part of eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbas is, you know, composed of native Russian speakers and native Ukrainian speakers. And it was always a Ukrainian-speaking place until really the industrialisation period in the early 20th century when Russia sent in Russian speakers to work the mines and the steel plants there. And so Russian became the dominant language. But if you get outside of the cities, you would run into people who were speaking Ukrainian or in the case of several of the villages that I taught in or met people in they even spoke what was called surzhyk, which is this mix of Russian and Ukrainian. And when I would speak to them about politics and about where their loyalties lie, you know, a lot of them identified strongly with the region and were always sceptical of the national centres. You know, they felt as though they were ignored by both Moscow and Kyiv, that the capitals would use them for their steel, their taxes, and not put much money back into building up the region. So they felt very isolated.

And I think that sort of isolation or even alienation works in Russia’s favour in 2014, when there just weren’t enough people to rise up in Ukraine’s defence and fight back. There weren’t as many Russian supporters as there were in Crimea when Russia very easily and almost without firing a single bullet annexed Crimea after its stealth invasion. But because Kyiv had not really reached out to the east after its revolution in 2014 and said something along the lines of, you know, let’s build this new future without a corrupt president together, they weren’t really sure about where they should go. Now, that’s not to say that there weren’t protests and there weren’t people who were, you know, very pro-Ukrainian or pro-Kyiv. Those people did exist, but it was fertile for Russia’s propaganda and this stealth invasion of unmarked troops that sparked the war at first. But over the years, the Donbas became very patriotic and it was filled with people who were pro-Ukrainian. And a lot of people, including many of my friends, made a conscious choice to switch from speaking Russian to speaking Ukrainian as their dominant language. And that was because what Russia did out there, which is continue to fuel this war that dragged on and on and on until it exploded into this full-scale invasion again in February of last year.

Gideon Rachman
And coming back to the present. It was interesting talking to some of the strategists who assembled at this Munich security conference last week. Some felt that perhaps Ukraine should now withdraw from Bakhmut, that they too were taking very heavy casualties, that it wasn’t of such strategic significance that they had to keep fighting. But it seems to be of enormous symbolic significance. How do you see the future of this battle for Bakhmut?

Christopher Miller
I think the symbolic importance right now is outweighing the strategic importance for the Ukrainians. Zelenskyy himself, President Zelenskyy, has used the phrase “Bakhmut holds” and referred to the city as a fortress or Fortress Bakhmut. And it’s now become this battle cry for the Ukrainians. And the Russians have not seen a significant battlefield victory for months. And taking Bakhmut would still provide Putin the sort of propaganda victory that he would get if he were to say, we’ve taken the city of Bakhmut after what was a pretty long struggle. I think the Ukrainians don’t see necessarily a lot of strategic value in it, but the symbolic importance is huge and the Ukrainians are actually doing a very good job of holding the Russians back right now without expending a lot of their material that they’re getting from the west.

What I’ve been told by some of the commanders and soldiers on the ground around Bakhmut is that for the last few weeks, they’ve actually seen the Russians pull back some of their stronger fighters and use these mobilised forces in trying to overwhelm in sheer number the Ukrainians. But the Ukrainians are having great success in mowing them down with machine guns and smaller mortars, and they’re not having to use a lot of this new western weaponry that’s coming in. So if they can continue to do that without losing ground that could lead to their encirclement there, what I’ve been told is that they’re going to continue to do so. But they have dug in new positions all around Bakhmut. And certainly if Bakhmut isn’t itself strategic, the cities just to the west of it are, those being Konstantinovka, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. These are all cities that some of the folks listening to us now will have probably heard about because they are of great importance strategically and culturally to both Ukraine and to Putin, who’s used them in his speeches. And so that’s the goal of Russia is to take these towns. And the only way the Ukrainians are going to retreat from Bakhmut is if they absolutely have to.

Gideon Rachman
I mean, obviously, that’s the battle of the moment. And you explain very clearly why it’s so important to both sides. But everybody is now, having talked about the possible Russian offensive, focused on the possible Ukrainian offensive. We’ve touched upon it. And presumably they wanna contain the element of surprise and so on, so nobody can be quite sure what they’re going to do. But do they now feel they’ve got what they need to press ahead?

Christopher Miller
I think they feel as though they have been promised what they need to press ahead. A lot of what they’re able to do in regards to their desired counter-offensive will depend largely on what gets here and when it gets here. And they are tight-lipped about what exactly they want to do but I think it’s fair to say that certainly one goal is to try to cut the Russians off from Russia’s mainland, between Russia’s mainland and occupied Crimea. There’s this section in the south-east where the Ukrainians have had success in recapturing territory. They have seen some weaknesses in Russia’s defences down there. And that is one very likely point where they will attack, also up in the north-east around Kharkiv region. What they decide to do and when they decide to do it, I think, will largely depend on when these new tanks and weaponry arrive. We’ve already seen, I think, some of the US Bradley fighting vehicles arrive. Some soldiers were sending images and videos of them around on social media in the last 48 hours or so. So some of it is there and we might see evidence of the start of a Ukrainian offensive soon. Again, the weather is a factor. The ground is thawing right now. It’s the famous rasputitsa season where the winter ground thaws, everything gets really, really muddy and everybody has a hard time moving. And I think that also is allowing the Ukrainians to lobby their western partners, get new weaponry. As soon as the ground hardens up a little bit and Ukraine has a little bit more of what it needs, I think they certainly will launch some sort of offensive because time, as we said earlier, is likely on Russia’s side, not Kyiv’s.

Gideon Rachman
But we saw in the Russian offensive a year ago when they attacked Kyiv, the tanks can be very vulnerable. Are the Ukrainians confident that they’re not gonna be caught in the same kind of trap that the Russians?

Christopher Miller
I think what the Ukrainians are really good at is using the tanks as part of an offensive, not solely as vehicles that would be leading one. The Ukrainians have done just incredible things, utilising everything from commercial drones to larger Turkish-made drones, some of their own drones, in co-operation with some of their mechanised brigades that are operating heavy artillery or their armoured vehicles, as well as the western shoulder-fired rockets that have been very successful in taking out Russia’s own tanks. So these combined forces that the Ukrainians have, we’ve seen them be used with great success around Kharkiv, around Kherson in the fall. I think certainly the vehicles that they’re going to be getting and the weapons they’re going to be getting now are arguably even better than what they had at that time. So it’s certainly possible that they could be very successful. And, you know, one of the things that the Ukrainians have proven to be very good at is adapting and learning very quickly. Sometimes that’s being trained in the UK or Germany, and other times it’s just being really good at finding a YouTube video that shows you how to operate a shoulder-fired Javelin missile and then putting it to good use.

Gideon Rachman
So to summarise, Chris, with the anniversary of the Russian full-scale assault on Ukraine this week, I mean, it must be a very bittersweet moment for the Ukrainians. Terrible destruction, loss of life, but they’ve surprised everybody, perhaps even themselves. And from the sound of what you’re saying, they’re cautiously optimistic about what’s gonna happen in the war in the year ahead.

Christopher Miller
Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, first line of Ukraine’s national anthem is “Ukraine has not yet perished”. And I think that describes very well this moment. Nobody believed that Kyiv would stand or very few believed that Kyiv would stand. Many people thought it would fall and fall even in a few days or a couple of weeks. And it not only remained in Kyiv’s hands, but Ukrainians managed to repel the Russian blitzkrieg, push Russian forces back even further. And I think they feel as though momentum is on their side as well as much of the world at this point. And so they are going into the second year of the war now, very optimistic and even eager to try their hands at their own offensive.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Christopher Miller of the FT in Ukraine, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.

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