The Russian Armed Forces and PMC Wagner only made marginal gains on the ground at a cost of more than tens of thousands of casualties and have largely squandered the temporary military manpower advantage that the Russian military have received after the autumn mobilisation last year, a high-ranking NATO official told journalists, including a newsperson for Novaya-Europe, on condition of anonymity.
“There have actually not been any significant adjustments to the battlefield so far in 2023. The Russians have tried to launch a general offensive to extend control over the whole of the Donbas region. But it’s now been 80 days since that part of the campaign was renewed and pretty clearly a failure at this point,” he said.
The principal areas of focus are Bakhmut, Vuhledar and Avdiivka. Russian armed forces have likely made tactical gains only in two sectors in Donetsk around Bakhmut and Vuhledar, the official said. And after taking heavy losses in both places, they now seem to have shifted most operational focus in the last few weeks towards the Avdiivka, which is south of Bakhmut and Kreminna in the north, but largely just to stabilise the frontline.
“This suggests an overall return to a more defensive operational design, which is something that we saw when Surovikin was in charge of the ‘special military operation in January”,
says the NATO official.
“The offensives that they seem to have tried to launch earlier this year have not resulted in any kind of any consequence on the ground. If we look at Bakhmut, the assault has been largely stalled after making some advances in early March, largely due to the high casualties and because some regular Russian army units have been relocated to other sectors.
Ukraine has also suffered heavy attrition during the defensive at Bakhmut, but was reinforcing throughout March with more elite units,” the official told reporters.
He also noted that Russian armed forces and Wagner began to focus on Bakhmut in May of 2022. “So we’re now at ten months, 11 months for focused operations there,” he said.
“There’s not much left in Bakhmut. And so even if Bakhmut were to fall, there’s no militarily significant terrain there. There’s very little infrastructure left. It looks like WW1, WW2.”
The official does not think that Yevgeny Prigozhin is a real threat to Shoigu or Gerasimov, but makes a point that
Putin has a history of “putting people that really strongly dislike each other in direct contact with each other.”
“He wants success. But he also wants to be sure that he’s safe and secure. And that’s one way he does it. We do need to look at it because I don’t think it makes them more effective. But I’m not always certain it makes them less effective either,” the official said. “If the artillery ban [affecting PMC Wagner] endures, Prigozhin will likely be forced to reduce the scale or intensity of military operations in Ukraine.”
“Just because the Russians aren’t aren’t able to fight and translate military operations into success politically doesn’t mean that they don’t cause a tremendous amount of death and destruction.
You have 11 million people that are refugees; that’s a quarter of [Ukraine’s] population. You have a number of internally displaced people. Also, you have tremendous infrastructure damage, damage to civilians, civilian homes, civilian infrastructure, in addition to military targets being struck all around Ukraine. And lots and lots of people have been killed on both sides.
It is a humanitarian issue to resolve the war as quickly as possible because peace should yield safety. The longer the war goes on, the worse it is for all people, not just the militaries. They’re engaged in an illegal war, but real people are affected by this, including those in in Bakhmut,” the NATO official concluded.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of mercenary group PMC Wagner, said that a Russian flag had been hoisted over the city hall in Bakhmut, and the city had been “legally captured”, yesterday.
Ukrainian authorities denied Prigozhin’s statements. “Bakhmut is Ukrainian, and they have not captured anything and are very far from it, to put it mildly,” Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the Eastern Group of Ukrainian troops, told Reuters. According to him, fighting continues around the city hall, and in the “legal sense” the Russian forces have not captured anything.
Fights for Bakhmut in the Donetsk region have been ongoing since July 2022. The US Institute for the Study of War reported last week that Russian troops had captured approximately two thirds of the city’s territory.
