www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-updates
Key Takeaways
Ukrainian authorities indicated that Ukraine will continue to defend Bakhmut for now.
Bakhmut is not intrinsically significant operationally or strategically as ISW has previously observed. But Ukraine’s fight for Bakhmut has become strategically significant because of the current composition of Russian forces arrayed in the area. The Battle of Bakhmut may, in fact, severely degrade the Wagner Group’s best forces, depriving Russia of some of its most effective and most difficult-to-replace shock troops.
Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin apparently fears that his forces are being expended in exactly this way. The severe degradation or destruction of the elite Wagner fighting force would have positive ramifications beyond the battlefield.
The Kremlin is returning to its previously unsuccessful volunteer recruitment and crypto-mobilization campaigns to avoid calling the second mobilization wave. The return of the voluntary recruitment and crypto-mobilization campaigns likely indicates that the Kremlin will not launch another mobilization wave at least before the summer 2023 due to spring conscription cycle on April 1.
A reportedly captured Russian military manual suggests that Russian forces intend to use the newly created “assault detachment” elements in urban warfare.
Russian forces utilized a new type of guided aerial bomb against Ukrainian targets amid continued precision missile shortages.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
Russian forces secured territorial gains in Bakhmut but have not yet encircled the city or forced Ukrainian forces to withdraw.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks near Avdiivka and west of Donetsk City.
Russian forces continue struggling to maintain fire control over the Dnipro River Delta in Kherson Oblast.
Russian military command is failing to properly equip its forces despite forces increasingly conducting close combat in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials reported on alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
[Expansion: Prigozhin is one of the very few with a serious military force loyal to himself. He has even seemed at times a possible threat to Putin or a possible successor. Which may be why Putin is allowing the Russian MoD to hang him out to dry. Badly damaging Prigozhin’s power and reputation within Russia would be an important accomplishment from the standpoint of the long-term prospects for restoring sanity in Russia. That is an aim in America’s interests as well as in Ukraine’s, and it raises the stakes in the Battle of Bakhmut beyond matters of terrain and battlespace geometry.]