Times article today:
In battle for Bakhmut, deaths mount for Russia and Ukraine
The grinding battle will shape national demographics for generations, experts warn
T
he grim toll of the battle for Bakhmut is not lost on Alexander Matiash, who speaks slowly and with exhaustion after weeks of intense fighting around Chasiv Yar a few miles to the west.
This village on the road into the battered town reverberates constantly to the thump of British-made M777 howitzers firing towards Russian lines over Humvees and Australian-built Bushmaster vehicles. The crash of Russian rocket bursts comes as an inevitable response.
Matiash, 44, a special operations private, recalls an exchange of corpses last month when four truckloads of Russian dead were swapped for three truckloads of fallen Ukrainians.
“We’re losing people with two university diplomas each, they’re losing their trash with three convictions each,” [this is so depressing] sighs Matiash, who runs a popular military video blog featuring his first person fighting. Here, in a battle that will shape the course of the warr_ in the east, the dead and dying, mostly young men in their twenties and thirties, are mounting on both sides in a fight that has lasted seven long months.
International observers, including Britain’s Ministry of Defence, have hailed recent successes by Kyiv’s forces. Defence officials yesterday said Russian assaults were at a “reduced level” and Wagner mercenaries, often described as President Putin’s “private army”, had been pushed back from a key supply route into Bakhmut. “Personnel shortages are likely [to be] hampering Russian offensive efforts in this sector,” the MoD said.
This was underscored yesterday by an admission from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner chief, that his forces were suffering. “The battle for Bakhmut today has already practically destroyed the Ukrainian army and, unfortunately, it has also badly damaged the Wagner private military company,” he said in an audio message.
President Zelensky, who recently travelled to the Bakhmut area to meet the troopss_, continues to insist the fight here must continue, despite the losses. He warned yesterday that President Putin must be denied any opportunity to “sell” a victory at home and abroad. “If he will feel some blood, smell that we are weak, he will push, push, push,” Zelensky told the Associated Press. “Our society will feel tired. Our society will push me to have compromise with them.”
Villages, towns and cities around Bakhmut have emptied, their residents likely swelling the ranks of some eight million Ukrainian refugees, one fifth of the country’s population, who have already fled to Europe.
In Chasiv Yar, a gilded statue of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky provides an apt representation of the damage Putin’s war is doing to a people who can trace their shared culture back a thousand years to the foundation of the kingdom of Kyivan Rus. Gorky stands decapitated, his head and shoulders ripped off by a Russian shell.
The Kremlin began the war claiming it would protect Russian-speakers, demilitarise Ukraine and preserve the concept of family values against the decadent West. Yet across areas of Ukraine where Russian was once commonly spoken, millions have now chosen to speak Ukrainian.
Researchers say the grinding battle and those ahead will make both Ukraine and Russia unrecognisable for generations to come. “It really is awful if you look at Ukraine’s demographic tree. There was already a really tiny proportion of the population in their twenties. Russia has a similar problem,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and an adviser to Zelensky’s administration.
“Twenty years ago it was the end of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, really tough times, particularly in Ukraine. People just put off having children. So we were looking at losing 33 per cent of the population even without talking about the war.
“The correct approach should be to do whatever it takes for Ukraine to win and stop the war soon,” he added. “Not only for Ukraine but for Europe to be able to reallocate defence spending back into schools and social care, to unblock supply chain issues and to safeguard democracy from the threat of Russia.”
Each side is thought to have already taken more than 100,000 military casualties each, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians likely to have been killed as well. “Putin’s legacy will be as the biggest slaughterer of the Slavic people since the Second World War,” Mylovanov said. Putin, meanwhile, has admitted for the first time that international sanctions could have “negative” consequences, having previously insisted Russia could adapt by trading elsewhere.
When the war finally ends, both Ukraine and Russia will have to seek migration to revive their populations, Mylovanov said. “They will have to rely . . . on lots of migration from the post-Soviet countries, Georgia, Azerbaijan, all the ‘stans’. You can particularly imagine people from there coming to Ukraine as a democratic country with candidate status to the European Unionn_.”
For Zelensky, Ukraine and its allies must keep up the pressure. British Challenger 2 tanks and German Leopard 2s are being readied for the battlefront, while a shipload of hundreds of US infantry fighting vehicles, among them Strykers and Bradleys, this week docked in Germany bound for Ukraine.
LIBKOS
“He doesn’t have allies,” Zelensky said of Putin, claiming it was clear that even China was unwilling to back Russia. More should be done, he said, to target Putin’s enablers, who “have to know that they will lose all their money — all their real estate in Europe or in the world, their yachts everywhere”.
Despite Putin’s provocations, Zelensky said he does not believe the Russian leader is prepared to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. “If a person wants to save himself, he really . . . will use these,” he said. “I’m not sure he’s ready to do it.”