The few 7,000 residents left in the Ukrainian town survive underground, fearful for their children’s future if Russian mercenaries enter.
The crowd gathered in Sloviansk Cathedral Square silently attends yet another funeral in recent days. This time it is about a soldier -Denys Eduardovich Cochenko, 22 years old- who belongs to a medical brigade who has been destroyed by Russian artillery while trying to help the last inhabitants of Bakhmut, the village for which they fight to the death Ukrainian soldiers against Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group. The body arrives in a Red Cross refrigerated truck decorated with Ukrainian flags. He is carried by a rose corridor that has been put up by the crowd. After the church service, the hymn sounds, which cannot silence the heartbreaking cry of the mother of the fallen; She clings to her stiff body and kisses her swollen face non-stop until, in a gesture of love and pity, the relatives seize her and separate her from the corpse.
The battle for Bakhmut has become the symbolic clash that defines the present moment – of stagnation and fierce fighting – of a war that promises to be long. The population, belonging to the Donetsk oblast or region, which numbered 70,000 before the war, is now home to a few hundred civilians and thousands of Ukrainian soldiers fighting one against ten against the Russian forces. The shelling with artillery, mortars and rockets never ceases day and night. Casualties on both sides run into the dozens a day, so much so that there are doubts about the need to resist in an enclave that NATO allies deem of little strategic value, even though the railway line runs through it.
“The Russians,” says a volunteer on the ground who refused to be identified, “send ten to fifty Wagner convicts against Ukrainian lines every day. They are barely armed, they are human bullets. The meaning is different: when they are killed by the best Ukrainian troops, they remain located and then the Russians crush the positions with their artillery. They don’t even wait for their troops to leave there. They don’t care. Russia loses thousands of convicts that it no longer needs to feed or maintain , while Ukraine sees dozens of well-trained men die. This is, in chess terms, trading pawns for queens.”
Reaching Bakhmut is not easy. In the north, Wagner’s troops captured the village of Blahodatne, very close to Soledar, on Tuesday, which fell in January. And from there they attack and threaten the M03 highway, which comes from Sloviansk. In the same area, British volunteers Andrew Bagshaw and Christopher Perry disappeared on January 6; it was later learned that they died trying to evacuate the last civilians from Soledar.
To the south, the Russians are close to the road connecting Bakhmut to Kostiantynivka, and they are constantly sweeping it with mortar fire. In this section, soldiers and volunteers die every day trying to keep the resistance alive around a population that is already one of the symbols of this war. The only remaining umbilical cord for Bakhmut is a small path full of potholes and sinkholes, which starts from the village of Chasiv Yar. Yet there are people who describe the route as extremely dangerous. After leaving a forest, the vehicles must drive through an open field before descending to Bajmut, who is in a hollow. It is then that the Russian drones appear and locate the vehicles, which are later riddled with artillery.
It’s best to arrive ‘on a cloudy day’ to minimize the ability of drones and satellites to locate the cars,’ residents advise. The Russian command assured on Wednesday that Bakhmut was completely surrounded, but that it was still possible to enter the city that day. That does not remove the danger of the attempts: on January 10, two Polish volunteers were seriously injured and this week a medical brigade of the Ukrainian army was severely punished. By the day, access is becoming more dangerous and complicated, and the city, known for its famous salt mines, is already at real risk of being taken by Russian troops.
Some 10,000 inhabitants resist as best they can underground, protected by thousands of soldiers who fight the invader from icy trenches and spend the night by candlelight in flooded bunkers. Hand-to-hand combat almost always takes place at night. But the bombardments never stop.
Death comes to his appointment again and again, with no one to predict which house will be destroyed or who will summon the Grim Reaper. From time to time on the street, like ghosts, you see a resident trying to survive the trance, like the old woman chopping firewood in a downtown park, the young woman who smokes out of fear at the door of the shelter and clinging to a sleigh with the one carrying the groceries, or the man crouching against a wall while petting his dog, as if trying to give him hope that, judging by his expression, he doesn’t seem to keep to himself.
In a basement, what used to be the local boxing club has been transformed into one of what President Zelensky calls “invincibility points.” Two enormous wood-burning stoves heat the large space where a priest with a guitar celebrates a sung mass. A handful of volunteers offer hot soup at the corner where the silent Bakhmuts charge their mobile phones. The ring where the boxing fights were settled is now occupied by three or four children who play without being aware of everything. “There are – says a Ukrainian volunteer – about five hundred babies in the underground of Bakhmut. That’s why we have to resist. Imagine what can happen if the murderers and rapists who are part of Wagner come here.
However, not all residents of the city resort to patriotic speeches. In contrast, some of the older ones show certain pro-Russian leanings. A woman tells a stunned journalist that the Russian missiles coming down in front of us are actually from Ukraine. Vaclav, an old man in an ushanka hat, assures that the city is called “Artemiusk” (Russian name for Bakhmut) and confirms that he was a soldier of the Soviet Union in the past. “I was injured in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s,” he recalls.
“Most residents support Ukraine, but have fled to safer areas. Among those who remain are old people, some of whom still have emotional ties to the USSR. We even suspect that some of them are spies,” says a volunteer with long experience in the area.
Western strategic experts believe Bakhmut’s fall is imminent. However, they give it little strategic value, even though it is a railway hub and a step further towards the vital cities of Sloviansk and Krammatorsk. Russia has begun replacing the Wagner Group mercenaries with soldiers from the conventional army, part of the 300,000 recruits mobilized months ago who have been trained and armed for the occasion. And it is ‘vox populi’ that a major offensive by Putin seems imminent, perhaps, according to official European sources, “before the first anniversary of the war, on February 24.”
If this prediction comes true, it will be a long time before the Leopard and Abrams tanks promised by the Western Allies arrive. For this reason, US President Joe Biden has in recent days urged his counterpart Volodimir Zelensky to abandon Bakhmut and concentrate his forces on the southern front, which is strategically much more important.
But the Ukrainian leader is not giving in for the time being. What’s more, he has sent his own presidential guard to fight in this “21st century Stalingrad” after acknowledging that the clashes were “fierce”. Daily casualties on both sides run into the dozens. Will Bakhmut go down after wrapping up in the next few days as an Azovstal sequel? Or will it hold up against all odds, as Kiev and Kharkov did before it? Nobody knows. But what is clear is that Bakhmut is already a hell on earth whose memory will last.
Source: La Verdad
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