Bakhmut: nine months under siege and still no confirmed fall

Nine months of siege in Bakhmut and still no confirmed fall

The city would already have fallen. Again. The starting point is blunt: the Wagner Group, presented as the world’s best fighting unit, “has already conquered Bakhmut,” and from there the Russian army would steamroll across all of eastern Ukraine without difficulty. The war, according to that reading, is for Moscow “a simple training exercise.” Against that version, a wall of caution has risen that ended up weighing more than euphoria: no one has seen confirmation.

What is asked, again and again, is patience. Wait for news and cross-check it through several independent channels. And, above all, wait to see whether the next Ukrainian defensive line is really on the western bank of the Dnieper River: that separates an orderly retreat from a disaster. As long as there is no answer, everything else is noise.

Has Bakhmut fallen? The confirmation that never comes

The question, now a recurring joke, is whether the city has fallen again. “It keeps falling,” sums up the exasperation at a succession of announcements that contradict one another. Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade maintains, in a circulated message, that its units are still fighting inside the city and inflicting damage on the enemy advance.

The geographic nuance is the key to the disagreement. Bakhmut —or Artemovsk, under the Russian name— is described as half-taken: the eastern half in Russian hands and a western strip still contested, with Ukrainian forces consuming units to keep the exit corridor open. Other accounts scale Russian control down to a handful of blocks. The comparison that imposes itself: whoever controls a peripheral neighborhood does not control the city, just as whoever controls Carabanchel does not control Madrid.

The antiestéticar emphasized is of pure attrition. If the defense is maintained house by house, Ukraine’s strategic reserve runs out and the announced spring offensive is left without muscle.

Casualty figures: from 1,000 a day to 450 in a single day

Here the swampy ground begins. A circulating calculation attributes to Ukrainian forces losses of more than 1,000 soldiers a day in Bakhmut over about three months. Another estimate, cited as coming from Russian sources, lowers the range to between 300 and 500 daily, with 450 in a single day. The distance between one figure and another is not a nuance: multiplied by weeks, it completely changes the reading of who is bleeding out.

• More than 1,000 daily casualties, according to a calculation attributed to a Ukrainian source
• Between 300 and 500 daily, according to cited Russian sources
• 450 in a single day, a figure attributed to those same sources

Hence the demand for independent confirmation is not a formality. No one signs off on those accounts. And without a signature, the only verifiable thing is that we have been waiting nine months for a capture announced long ago and fourteen since another was expected, that of Kyiv.

Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Soledar: the same script

Precedents shape the conversation. The same certainties were stated with Mariupol. With Severodonetsk. With Soledar. Each fell after a long and costly siege, and each was preceded by premature announcements. Some draw a rule from this: two or three years of war at minimum, with averages of three to six months of siege per medium-sized city, within the continent’s densest fortification system.

The comparison with Stalingrad that slips into some message gets an immediate response: “Are you seriously comparing Stalingrad with Bakhmut?” The scale does not allow the parallel, though the mechanics —a city turned into a sinkhole for resources— has uncomfortable similarities.

A paramilitary organization against an army with NATO support

The most repeated argument is about outcome, not tactics: a paramilitary organization would have defeated in combat the army of a country receiving help from NATO. The fine print is that this help does not imply a presence on the ground, and there enters the suspicion circulating about Western private contractors operating in Ukraine, with the company Academi —the former Blackwater— as a named example. These are claims that come without public documentation to back them up.

On the other side is the inverse narrative. Fourteen months later, the capture of Kyiv did not come. Europe did not freeze in winter, gas is trading at lows and the ruble has not served as a refuge, as is recalled. Every announced escalation with which threats were made has still not materialized.

And so the matter remains, stuck at the same point as at the start. The city that has already fallen several times still has no official record. The figures that should settle the doubt come from interested parties and do not match. No one knows when the paragraph missing here can be written with certainty.