Battle for Bakhmut Is Critical Test of Russia’s Prospects in Ukraine

“We’re so used to it by now, we no longer pay much attention,” Ms. Bondarenko, 76, said as she pointed to a nearby crater left by a Russian shell in the morning. “It’s been going on for months. When is it going to end?”

“It’s probably never going to end,” replied Ms. Shilkova, 75.

Their apartments have had no heating, power or running water for months. The only available food comes from volunteers. “It’s a humanitarian catastrophe. That’s how we live,” Ms. Bondarenko said.

Russian soldiers and fighters from the Wagner private military company have been fighting to capture Bakhmut, a town of 70,000 people that was best known for its sparkling wines before the war, for nearly six months now.

Daily Russian pounding has turned the once-elegant city center into a succession of obliterated facades, with debris strewn on the streets amid freshly dug-out trenches and antitank barriers.

The Russians reached the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut in early July, in the wake of their last successful offensive, the seizure of nearby Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. The tide of war has dramatically turned in Kyiv’s favor elsewhere in the country since then, as Ukrainian forces ousted Russian troops from vast areas of the Kharkiv, Donetsk and, last month, Kherson regions.

Now, Bakhmut has become the war’s main battlefield, with Ukraine and Russia alike pouring in troops, tanks and artillery, in a concentration of firepower rarely seen since the invasion began 10 months ago. Wagner’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has recruited tens of thousands of criminals in Russian prisons for the storming of Bakhmut. Moscow has also sent some of the 300,000 new troops mobilized since October.

The future of Bakhmut is vital for Mr. Prigozhin, a confidant of President

Vladimir Putin

who criticized regular Russian military commanders as inept, touted Wagner as the country’s best fighting force and secured access to Russian prisoners and generous state funding after promising to capture the Ukrainian city months ago.

The new Russian military commander in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, also has much at stake here. Appointed in early October, Gen. Surovikin justified last month’s withdrawal from Kherson in part by citing the need to use those troops for offensive operations elsewhere.

“Surovikin must show some sort of victory somewhere since his appointment,” said Fedir Venislavskiy, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s national-security, defense and intelligence committee. “What the Russian military and political leadership desire very much is a capture of Bakhmut. And that’s why both Surovikin and Prigozhin are throwing all their forces at it.”

Ukraine’s calculation is also not purely based on a strictly military rationale. If Bakhmut were to fall, the town of Chasiv Yar on heights just to the west of it could provide a convenient line of defense for the Ukrainian-controlled 40% of the Donetsk region that Russia claims as its own.

 “From the military standpoint, Bakhmut doesn’t have strategic significance,” the commander of Ukrainian land forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a Ukrainian TV appearance this month. “But, at the same time, it has psychological significance.”

Indeed, a retreat from Bakhmut would signal Ukraine losing the initiative after four months of steady advances, raising Russian morale and making it harder to pursue further Ukrainian offensives in Donetsk and the nearby Luhansk region. That is why, in the past three weeks, Ukraine has saturated the area with fresh troops and equipment.

Through most of the war, Ukraine usually tried to avoid set-piece battles where both sides concentrate their resources, aware that this type of warfare can play to Russia’s advantages.

“Some of the things that make us strong, such as independence, initiative, the ability to act even when without clear orders, can also become our weaknesses when many units are in the same place, and each has their own view,” said Mykola Volokhov, commander of the Terra drone-reconnaissance unit that, among other Ukrainian forces, was relocated to Bakhmut from the Kherson front this month. “The outcome in Bakhmut will depend on the ability of our forces to achieve coordination.”

Another part of the puzzle is what happens on the Kreminna-Svatove front to the north, where Ukrainian offensive operations have been literally bogged down because of weather that has made unpaved roads impassable. A sustained drop in temperatures, Ukrainian commanders say, could freeze the ground and allow Ukrainian forces to resume their push eastward.

If successful, that would endanger the rear of Russian troops attacking Bakhmut, likely forcing them to retreat. Conversely, Russian advances in Bakhmut, if they come first, would relieve the Ukrainian pressure on Kreminna and Svatove.  

The initial Russian approach in Bakhmut over the summer was to rain heavy artillery on the city, turning one urban area after another into rubble, before attempting infantry attacks. That is the way Russia seized the city of Mariupol in May, and the way it captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in June and July. Months of fierce fighting near Bakhmut, however, have brought only limited gains.

A commander of a Ukrainian Akatsiya 152 mm howitzer battery, a captain who goes by the call sign Captain, said that the intensity of Russian fire in Bakhmut these days is much lower than what he experienced on the Kherson front before redeploying here early this month.

“We have a huge concentration of our own artillery here,” the captain said as a U.S.-made M109 Paladin howitzer from another brigade rolled into a field behind him and opened fire. “And I guess the Russians are starting to run out of ammo.”

Trying to overrun Ukrainian positions, Wagner is sending wave after wave of small storm groups made up of convicts who face the threat of execution for desertion, and a promise of amnesty if they survive six months in Ukraine. Better equipped and better motivated than the mobilized Russian troops on other front lines, these Wagner men have been successful at times—but at a tremendous cost.

“Nobody cares about their lives,” said Yuri, who like most Ukrainian soldiers is only allowed to give his first name or call sign. “We shoot them, and they keep coming back, like cockroaches. The fields all around us stink because of their corpses, but there is still one wave coming after another.”

The Ukrainians, too, are incurring casualties here. On a recent day, Ukrainian soldiers rushed a stretcher with the corpse of one of their comrades, already in a plastic bag, across the Bakhmutka River that runs through the city.

Volleys of gunfire rang out and then a Russian shell slammed into a hillside nearby, a bright flash followed by a plume of dark smoke. In an improvised medical facility established in the outskirts of the city, after the field hospital in central Bakhmut was repeatedly shelled and closed down, three more such plastic bags were piled up in the driveway, awaiting transport.

“The Russians are emptying their prisons and sending their worst to die here, while we are losing some of our best. It’s not at all a fair trade,” said Sergiy Stakhovsky, a Ukrainian tennis player and winemaker who is fighting in Bakhmut as part of a mortar unit.

While Russian offensives aim to encircle Bakhmut, so far at least three main supply roads remain under Ukrainian control. Military traffic flows in and out of Bakhmut at all hours, with ammunition, fuel and food arriving at the front lines and troops rotating from shifts at the fighting positions to outposts in the rear.

Roughly one-tenth of Bakhmut’s prewar civilian population remains, Ukrainian officials say. It is divided among the so-called zhduny, the Russian sympathizers who await a Russian takeover, along with people who are too poor, old or sick to leave, and Ukrainians who profess faith in the Ukrainian army’s ability to hold the city and eventually force the Russians to withdraw.

One of the latter, Tetiana Shcherbak, is a nurse who runs a so-called Resilience Center that Ukrainian authorities opened in an abandoned store earlier this month. There, volunteers disburse tea, coffee, hot food and some medicines to local residents.

A generator allows visitors to charge their phones and other devices, and a Wi-Fi service provides a way to connect with friends and families. A TV mounted on the wall blares out Ukrainian news to people who often have no way of knowing what is happening in the war.

“The main help that people need here is psychological help. It’s not simple at all. In our center, people can at least talk to each other, watch the news on TV, and that makes it easier to survive,” said Ms. Shcherbak. She added that she had no plans to flee. “Of course Bakhmut will hold out,” she said, reciting a part of the national anthem as her eyes welled up. “We believe in our soldiers, in our eagles, in our falcons. We’re Ukrainian.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com