Kyiv, Ukraine – According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Bakhmut resembles Hiroshima after the atomic bomb in 1945.
The devastated southeastern city, home to some 70,000 people before the outbreak of war, has been reduced to ruins after a 10-month siege.
“Nothing alive anymore. All buildings have been destroyed,” Zelenskyy said at a meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) countries in Hiroshima on Sunday.
Hours earlier, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, announced a full takeover of Bakhmut, while Kiev said it still had a foothold on the outskirts of the mining and university city.
If confirmed, the capture of Bakhmut would be Russia’s first military gain since the fall of Soledar, a much smaller city northeast of Bakhmut, in January.
The gain, however, is more symbolic than strategic — especially given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a triumphant blitzkrieg in Ukraine in February 2022.
Bakhmut was largely preoccupied with Wagner’s forces, a group largely made up of untrained prisoners recruited from Russian prisons after regular Russian military personnel proved too disorganized, discouraged and poorly trained.
Wagner began human wave attacks called “meat marches” in December. They were supported by massive, almost round-the-clock artillery and mortar fire and airstrikes.
A leading Ukrainian military expert said Wagner has bled out from colossal losses of manpower and equipment as they slowly marched from street to street.
“This is a pyrrhic victory for Wagner,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces, told Al Jazeera.
“Prigozhin also understands,” he said. “He just had to report a military-political result [to Putin]something other than Soledar.”
Prigozhin reportedly made a personal promise to Putin to take Bakhmut, even though the city had lost its transport and logistical importance to the Ukrainian armed forces, which shifted their supply lines last year.
Romanenko said Kiev forces still control the hills near Bakhmut, preventing Russia’s advance into the heavily fortified towns and villages of Chasiv Yar, Konstantinivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
US President Joe Biden told the G7 that the Russians had lost 100,000 servicemen there since the siege began in July — more than Bakhmut’s entire pre-war civilian population.
Russia lost five servicemen to Ukraine, a NATO source told CNN on Sunday.
Prigozhin said his mercenaries will withdraw from Bakhmut in a few days.
They will turn the city over to regular Russian military personnel, he said, something that could prove problematic as they are largely made up of recently mobilized men with poor training and low morale.
Ukraine has never disclosed its military losses, but they were so severe that in February, according to leaked US documents, the White House urged Kiev to leave Bakhmut.
‘They want me back’
Some Ukrainian servicemen expressed doubts about their commanders, saying they were forced to return to Bakhmut’s defenses despite serious injuries.
“A bomb went off just meters from me,” a Ukrainian soldier who said he had arrived in Kiev for a “quick repair” and his son’s baptism told Al Jazeera.
“I see double, I had five bruises, but they want me back,” he said on condition of anonymity.
For his wife, his return to the front seems like an absolutely unnecessary sacrifice.
‘Do they have to finish him off there? Why can’t they find someone younger, someone who hasn’t been hurt that often?” she told Al Jazeera.
Bakhmut’s takeover seemed especially bitter after Ukraine launched a surprising and successful counterattack there this month.
But the counterattack was apparently intended to save the remaining Ukrainian military, a military analyst said.
“The goal has been achieved,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of the University of Bremen in Germany told Al Jazeera. “The [city] has been abandoned.”
Bakhmut’s fall could delay a much larger counter-offensive in the south, especially in the Zaporizhia region, where Kiev had been gathering troops in recent weeks, he said.
The delay is also related to the arrival of new Western weapons, particularly advanced German-made Leopard A1 tanks, he said.
Ukrainian troops “most likely will not launch an offensive in the south or elsewhere until they have received and tested 80 Leopard A1 tanks that have been promised to them before June 1,” Mitrokhin said.
The delay could harm the recovery of Ukraine’s economy, which contracted by nearly a third last year and has only just recovered, observers said.
Western governments and millions of refugees are waiting for the end of the war to pour in aid and return home.
“Of course, if the [victory] when the date is postponed by years, there are almost no opportunities for development,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.
Kremlin rejoices
Despite what Zelensky said about the ruins of Bakhmut, to the Kremlin and its backers, it was not Hiroshima.
It’s not even Bakhmut because they constantly use the name of the Soviet-era city, Artyomovsk.
The Kremlin released a statement promising state prizes to “all who distinguish themselves”, and pro-war Russians competed for the “triumph”.
“Artyomovsk has been liberated. It is a historic event,” a news presenter on Kremlin-controlled Channel One announced on Sunday. “The myth that Artyomovsk is an impregnable fortress has been destroyed.”
“The takeover opens a direct and short path to “the eastern city of Dnipro,” the Russia 1 channel reported.
A few figures on the Moscow side who dare to contradict the Kremlin’s position do not see the Bakhmut takeover as a major event.
“The effort wasted on Bakhmut’s takeover is incalculable,” Aleksandr Khodarovsky, a commander in the separatist-controlled “Donetsk People’s Republic,” wrote on Telegram on Sunday. “Bakhmut is not Berlin and its fall does not mean the end of the war.”
Another rebel warlord echoed Romanenko’s words about Russia’s “Pyrrhic Victory”.
“It wasn’t even worth the troops and the money spent on it,” Igor Girkin, a former defense minister in separatist-occupied Donetsk, said in a Telegram post.