The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine War Q&A Series: What's Going On in Bakhmut? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

The third question of the Q&A series is...what's going on in the city of Bakhmut? The city is in ruins, the bodies are stacking up, and the Russians still don't have much to show for it... Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-war-qa-series-3

Here's a question. A lot of you asked, what the hell's going on in the city of Ba'hmut? Now, Bakhmut is a place in eastern Ukraine where the Russians have been throwing themselves at the Ukrainian defenders for months now. Apparently, the devastation is just extreme. There's probably no building in the city that's still standing. Lots of people, assuming they are still there at all, are living in basements. Everyone else has just left. And this is the place that Dimitri Pragason, he's the leader of Wagner, has just, has just, tried to make the centerpiece of his participation in the war in Ukraine, thinking that if he can achieve a significant breakthrough somewhere, then he can go to Putin and say, look, Wagner is great, I am great,

and I should be part of the formal chain of command, and you know what, maybe just make me defense minister. And, well, he has proven that he is incompetent as a military leader, and he has burned through huge numbers of people. So Wagner is the group that has gone into prisons and recruited people to fight for six months in order to have their sentences commuted. And he has used them as cannon fodder to clear minefields to charge very lightly armed with no training straight into Ukrainian positions

to soften them up. And then the professional Russian soldiers that have been recruited by Wagner in the past are then supposed to take advantage of those circumstances and push forward. And they have pushed forward by inches, not miles inches. And six months on, those parts of Bakamut that are still in Ukrainian hands. of late Progazan has been screaming from the rooftops that he's not getting the equipment and especially the ammo that he needs but considering that he's literally after the defense minister's job

you can understand why the defense minister's like you know what if Progazen were to experience a high profile defeat you know that would be so awful and in the last few days we've had some interesting leaks out of the Pentagon papers if you remember that from last couple of weeks indicating that there is intel from the Ukrainians and from the Americans that Prahazan has actually approached the Ukrainians with tactical information on the disposition of Russian forces, not Wagner forces, Russian government military forces. He said, like, if I kind of zig to the left, you can hit them on the right.

Now, the Ukrainians have not done anything with that information, so they don't consider him to be even remotely trustworthy. But the fact that we're hearing this from more than one source is kind of interesting. Now, the position of the Russians in Bachmuth, since it hasn't. achieved a breakthrough is probably not very good. Wagner itself has a problem here because they've already emptied the prison so they don't have any more cannon fodder and the rest of their troops are people who retired from Russian military service before the war who then got recruited into this paramilitary arm. Well there's no more of those to be had either because those are all being

grabbed by the military. So Pragasun has spent all the troops he's ever going to get and there's no point really from the Russian military's point of view in sending them equipment. even if they liked the guy. So the Russian military is now bit by bit taking over control, and they're a little bit more parsimonious with the men than Progazan is, which is, you know, I was saying something. And so in the last several days, we've actually seen some significant counterattacks by the Ukrainians in this space

that have reversed the flow of the territorial captures for the first time since this battle started, which was, I think, last July. It's been a long time. Now, that's kind of the background and the personalities. The question is what's going to happen now. Now, this city has no strategic significance. I mean, yes, it's at a road nexus, but as long as you've got Ukrainian or Russian forces within

15 miles of it, this whole nexus is under potential artillery threat. So neither side can or will use it unless there's a significant break and they're able to achieve huge breakthroughs in one direction or the other. That doesn't seem to be in the cards right now. But that doesn't mean we're not going to see more fighting here, because remember the Ukrainians are getting ready for their spring offensive. And one of the things that we saw last year is they advertised where they were going to go and then they went somewhere else in order to draw Russian forces off.

Their counterattacks in Bakhmut could very well be a similar sleight of hand. If they can force the Russians to reinforce in an area where they've already taken at least 20,000 deaths on 100,000 casualties, that can't be great for morale. And if you lock them down there, then those Russian forces are not somewhere else, where the Ukrainians might be more interest in launching a real assault. So, again, fog of war persists, but it looks like the Russians' chance for achieving this breakthrough is gone. And the question now is, what are the Ukrainians going to do about it?

Next question.