4:1 (Russian:Ukranian) according to estimates of opposing forces.
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Wagner forces sent to die in Bakhmut: ISW
The conflict between Russian Ministry of Defence and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin has likely reached a climax as thousands of fighters have died fighting in Bakhmut.
According to the Institute for Study of War (ISW) analysis, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) is “currently prioritizing eliminating Wagner on the battlefields in Bakhmut” which it concludes is slowing its advance in the area.
It said the conflict began when Prigozhin ran a “relentless defamation” campaign against senior figures in the Russian military, including Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
Now that the group has failed to show progress it is believed Russian MoD officials are “seizing the opportunity to deliberately expend both elite and convict Wagner forces in Bakhmut in an effort to weaken Prigozhin and derail his ambitions for greater influence in the Kremlin.”
The ISW believes Russian President Vladimir Putin likely became “alarmed” by Prigozhin’s political ambitions in October last year.
Putin likely stopped the Russian MoD from directly attacking Prigozhin but instead created conditions in which the Russian military leadership could reassume more authority. Such conditions likely threatened Prigozhin, who began to intensify his criticism of the Russian MoD and further deepened the conflict between Wagner forces and military leadership.
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Renaming the country would strike at the heart of Russia’s cultural tradition and vision of history, Shakhvorostova added.
Peter the Great renamed the Moscow Kingdom or “Muscovy” as the Russian Empire in 1721. With his war-time victory over Sweden, Peter annexed huge parts of today’s Ukrainian territory and took historical artifacts to Russia from Kyiv. But some current Russian historians deny that, saying Czar Ivan Grozny (also known as Ivan the Terrible) renamed the Moscow Kingdom as the Rus Kingdom in the 16th century.
Whether it gets the go-ahead or not, the Kremlin was incensed by the Ukrainian move.
The psyop is strong with this one.
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It has been four months since the end of the latest Ukrainian counter-offensive (November 11 was when Ukraine regained control of the entire right-bank Dnipro including Kherson). Since then, alarmist headlines have been talking about Russians supposedly turning the tide and gaining ground around Soledar and Bakhmut. Here are some numbers:
Between November 11, 2022 and March 13, 2023, Russia conquered 484 km2 of Ukrainian territory, losing 80,400 personnel and a total of 4,933 military vehicles in the process.
In the previous period of the same duration (July 13 to November 11) which included Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, Ukraine regained 16,232 km2 of its territory, killing 41,830 Russian troops and destroying 8,151 vehicles.
If Russians keep up the pace of these past four months, it will take more than 340 years, 82 million casualties and 5 million lost vehicles to conquer the rest of Ukraine. Or 10 years just to get back to where they were before the Ukrainian counter-offensives.
The Russian offensive around Bakhmut (484 km2, 80,400 dead) has managed to create some kind of macabre underworld version of Andorra (467 km2, 79,877 living).
I’m basing the area calculations on the DeepState Map which provides day-by-day history of occupied territories in handy GeoJSON format, and the casualty numbers from the daily briefings of the Ukrainian General Staff. Neither should be taken as absolute gospel, but they serve well to illustrate the point.
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Interesting numbers. Doesn’t this assume that all territory is of equal strategic value? For example, taking the ~300square miles of Kyiv is more meaningful that similar territory elsewhere.
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Well yes, I exaggerated the already absurd slowness of the Russian advance by imagining an absurd war that continues at constant pace down to the last meter of Ukrainian ground. It could never happen that way in reality, as even the example of Bakhmut shows - Russians managed to take empty fields outside the town relatively quickly, but the fortified town itself keeps holding out.
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That Ukrainian chart resembles the ones American prosecutors use when going after the Mob. Appropriately enough.
Speaking of gangsters, Prigozhin gives us another glimpse of his aspirations. He just needs to shove a little more fodder into his cannon.
[Archive]
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As a followup, here’s a chart of how the occupied area has changed over the past year:
DeepState Map has data starting April 3, but for the first few weeks it marked only the main routes of invasion, so for the sake of consistency the chart starts at April 24 when it switched to marking contiguous occupied areas.
April through June shows active Russian advance in the East - the fall of Mariupol, the takeover of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. It was when Russia had complete superiority in terms of artillery - Ukraine was almost out of shells and hadn’t started getting new guns from the West, and Russia could support its attacks with continuous artillery bombardment. End of June is when Ukraine started using HIMARS and other new long range systems, and the Russian advances essentially stopped. Then came the counteroffensives - Kharkiv in September, Kherson in October, and then Russians getting out of the rest of right-bank Dnipro in November. And the almost flat Russian winter offensive shows the best they can manage with only human waves of barely trained conscripts and no clear edge in artillery.
The total occupied area currently stands at a bit over 109 thousand km2, of which about 44 thousand are pre-February 24 boundaries: 27 in Crimea and 17 in Donbas.
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