Ukraine signals it will continue to fight for Bakhmut to drain Russia

Gradual Russian advances and heavy Ukrainian casualties have fueled talk of a withdrawal from the eastern city, but Ukrainians say Russian casualties are worse, a reason to keep fighting.

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine's top generals want to bolster the defenses of the beleaguered eastern city of Bakhmut, the government said Monday, signaling that rather than withdraw from the city, they will pursue a strategy of bleeding out the Russian army in a battle of attrition before a planned Ukrainian counterattack.

Ukraine has calculated that the brutal siege is weakening and immobilizing the Russian military, even as Kiev awaits a new arsenal of weapons from the West, including tanks and long-range precision rockets to enable a campaign expected to retake previously occupied territory ers. This achievement, Ukrainian officials say, justifies their own high casualty toll, although soldiers on the ground and some military analysts have questioned the wisdom of defending a ruined, mostly abandoned city.

In the see-saw fighting in the artillery-ravaged streets of the city and in nearby villages and agricultural fields, casualties on both sides were staggering, in the longest sustained Russian assault since last year's invasion. Gradual Russian advances have led some Ukrainian officials in recent weeks to hint at the possibility of a retreat to avoid encirclement, but Ukrainian assault brigades launched the attack over the weekend and appeared to push back Russian forces.

The leader of the Wagner mercenary group, which led Russian assaults on Bakhmut, said on Monday that Russia was in danger of losing the battle – within days only after claiming that the Ukrainians were on the brink of war. defeat.

After meeting with top generals on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, and the commander of the ground forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, supported the reinforcement of the defenses of Bakhmut.

ImagePlumes smoke rising from a Ukrainian position damaged by a Russian strike near Bakhmut this month.Credit...Daniel Berehula k/The New York Times

"Both generals replied: don't retreat and don't reinforce," Zelensky later said in his nightly video address. He added: "I told the Commander-in-Chief to find the appropriate forces to help the guys in Bakhmut."

Neither in his speech nor in a statement published earlier by his office, was there any mention of a possibility described by some independent analysts - a silent and gradual withdrawal from Ukraine into smaller, more defensible pockets within the city, rather than a sudden broad retreat.

In attacking Bakhmut since last summer, Russia's signature tactic has been to send in waves of assaults by small units that take frightening casualties, probing the defenses and forcing the Ukrainians who cut them down to reveal their positions to follow-up attackers. In particular, fighters recruited from among the detainees by the Wagner mercenary group were used in this way. , the U.S. Secretary of Defense, said, "What I see on a daily basis is that the Russians keep coming in droves of poorly trained and poorly equipped troops, and those troops are dying out very quickly."< /p>

No independent tally of the dead and wounded has been possible, and each side is seen as inflating the other's losses while concealing their own. Over the weekend, the secretary of the sec...