FRONTE DI BAKHMUT (DONETSK) – Along the 2,500 kilometers of the South-East front there is a point where the Russian offensive is not at all in difficulty and, on the contrary, is breaking through. Bakhmut. Or, as the generals of Mosca, “the claw of the hawks”. The city of the Doneskt region which was the pivot of Ukrainian defense until last summer (from here the reinforcement troops moved up to Severodonetsk under siege) is, not too slowly, slipping into a vice. The Russians are across the river, five kilometers from the half-destroyed bridge that divides Bakhmut into two. They are so close that they shoot at buildings with the 125mm guns mounted on their T90, the most modern and deadly tanks.
“They concentrated the most ferocious and prepared soldiers in the countryside, and the most devastating weapons at their disposal.” This is it, officer of the military police, indicates the positions of the enemy on the map on the mobile. “They are here, here, here, they come from all over. Heavy artillery, missiles, aviation, tanks crumbling the buildings on the outskirts. There are Wagner mercenaries, Kadyrov’s Chechens, elite troops …”.
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Here’s why Hawk’s Claw: This ghost town has become crucial to the Kremlin’s military strategy. They have deployed their best resources in the area against the Ukrainian front line sheltered in trenches reminiscent of those of the First World War: holes dug by hand in the earth that merge with the holes dug by mortars, in a landscape that thousands of explosions have made lunar. “Verdun, Kursk, Stalingrad? No, they are the Ukrainian positions near Bakhmut,” writes a military blogger posting on Twitter a video of a trench among the skeletons of charred trees.
President Zelensky also admits this in his evening messages to the nation. “Bakhmut is the place where we are most in difficulty”. We had been here, in the heart of the Donbass, at the end of May, when the city still harbored some hope despite the difference in forces in the field and the soldiers of Kiev all gathered at the Lucky bar drinking coffee before the front. Now it seems to be somewhere else. The bombs changed the urban connotations of some neighborhoods. Lucky bar is closed. In three weeks, weather conditions permitting, this could be the tip of a vast trident offensive: to the north from Belarus, to the center from Bakhmut, to the south on the Melitopol route. The goal seems to be to force the Ukrainians to scatter their forces and artillery, consuming their resources and slowing down the counter-offensive towards Kherson.
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Dyma exits the armored car parked in front of the only market left open in the central district. The echo of the bombing bounces between the walls of deserted houses. Before the war Bakhmut had 70 thousand inhabitants, now they are no more than 10 thousand. Especially old people, lonely people, families who do not want or cannot leave. There are those who have started drinking alcohol that can be bought at the pharmacy, to spend the night. At breakfast and lunch time the last remaining inhabitants cut the branches of the trees and light fires to cook in the courtyards of condominiums without electricity, gas, heating.
“They came to ask me to evacuate, but I refused,” she says Inna, 47 years old. He wears a blue handkerchief on his hair and an old jacket to protect himself from the cold that bites here, even now. Behind him, his mother is heating water in a cauldron on a makeshift oven built of mud, bricks and horse chestnut branches. “You can’t put your whole life in a suitcase and go like this, overnight. Do you want to know who’s to blame for all this? Politicians, dirty politicians! Both the Ukrainian ones, the Russian ones, both Zelensky and Putin. In recent years they have done nothing to prevent the situation from escalating “.
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As he speaks, a Ukrainian missile launcher positioned somewhere behind a row of buildings responds to Russian artillery. Inna and her mother don’t even notice it anymore. “Look at what conditions we are forced to live in, we are in the middle of a war that we don’t know when it will end. God damn them all.”