Russia Seeks Gains in Ukraine Before Western Tanks Arrive

Russian forces have advanced deeper into Bakhmut in recent days, according to Ukrainian soldiers there, moving house by house and threatening Ukraine’s hold on the eastern city, which Russia has made its main immediate target.

The Russian advance has been incremental and comes with heavy losses, Ukrainian commanders say. Ukrainian military and civilian leaders have said they would stand and fight for the city, and seek to whittle down Russian forces engaged in costly assaults.

Deeper Russian penetration into the city leaves Kyiv facing the choice of whether to pursue bloody street fighting or to withdraw to preserve troops. Ukrainian forces hold higher ground to the west of Bakhmut that is more easily defensible, and commanders have said the city holds little strategic value.

But Bakhmut has taken on a symbolic significance in recent months, as Russia seeks to expand its hold on the eastern Donbas region. Moscow has dispatched thousands of fighters from the paramilitary Wagner Group, many of them convicted criminals, in an effort to retake the city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky  visited the city in December and called it “Fortress Bakhmut.”

He has suggested that Ukraine will stand firm and seek to bleed Russian forces.

“The more Russia loses in this battle for Donbas, the less its overall potential will be,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address Thursday. “We know what the occupiers are planning. We are countering it.”

The Russian push comes as the war, approaching its first anniversary, has turned into a series of grinding battles along relatively static front lines, with neither side holding a clear upper hand.

Ukraine had taken the initiative last fall with a lightning assault in the northeast and an offensive in the south that reclaimed swaths of territory. But Moscow rushed tens of thousands of draftees and paramilitaries to shore up the front lines.

Russia is seeking a breakthrough here before the arrival of tanks pledged by Kyiv’s Western allies, which Ukraine says will help it slice through Russian lines and take back more territory.

The U.S. and European allies promised dozens of armored vehicles to Ukraine, including main battle tanks more powerful than the older models fielded by Russia.

A soldier from a tank unit operating Soviet-era T-72s in Bakhmut said Ukraine urgently needed that help. “They’ve seized a lot of positions, so the fight has become much harder,” he said. “We can hold the city, but only if we have help.”

Russia, meanwhile, appears to be banking on the brute force of waves of troops.

Ukrainian Lt. Oleksandr Matviyenko, the commander of a unit operating reconnaissance drones in Bakhmut, says that since Russia mobilized some 300,000 people and contracted thousands of criminals into Wagner, it has a seemingly endless supply of troops. “We mow down one group, then another comes, then another,” said Lt. Matviyenko.

He said Ukrainian forces could hold on in Bakhmut as long as their supply lines from the west remain intact. The bridges and roads in Chasiv Yar to the west, he said, are so far not being hit by Russian artillery.

The commander of a Ukrainian artillery unit positioned on a hill overlooking the city said he has had to replace the barrel of the Soviet-era gun he uses after firing 1,500 shells toward Russian positions in the past month. If they advance further into Bakhmut, he said, “the Russians will grind against it like cheese against a grater.”

Russia has in recent weeks taken Klishchiivka to the south and Soledar to the north, and is trying to surround Bakhmut from three directions. The city is being pounded daily by rockets, artillery and mortar fire, and small arms exchanges can be heard from the eastern side where Ukrainian and Russian units face off on two parallel streets.

The city center has become a ghost town. The only vehicles navigating the streets are dusty cars ferrying troops. Stray animals scavenge on heaps of trash left to rot by municipal workers who fled the city. Writing scrawled on the sides of buildings reads “Bakhmut is Ukraine” and “Russian pigs will die!”

At a children’s hospital on the western side of the city that now handles wounded Ukrainian soldiers, an arrow outside the entrance points left to a section marked “concussions,” and another points right toward a ward specializing in shrapnel wounds and serious injuries.

A paramedic at the hospital said earlier this week that he sleeps two hours a day and is reaching a breaking point. Two days later, Russia shelled the hospital, forcing the doctors and patients to move for the second time in the space of a month.

To the south, Ukrainian forces said on Friday they had repelled Russian attacks on Vuhledar and several other villages in the eastern Donetsk region over the preceding 24 hours. Serhiy Cherevatiy, spokesman for the armed forces in eastern Ukraine, said there was fierce fighting in Vuhledar but that Russia had failed to break through Ukrainian defenses.

Russia also launched 148 attacks along the front line with Ukrainian forces in the southern Zaporizhzhia region over the past day using tanks, rockets and artillery, the regional military administration said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had undertaken more offensive maneuvers over the past 24 hours both in Zaporizhzhia and Vuhledar, where it said it had launched strikes on Ukraine’s 72nd Brigade and had downed a Ukrainian Su-25 warplane.

“The situation at the front, and in particular in Donetsk region—near Bakhmut and Vuhledar, remains extremely acute,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address Friday. “The occupiers are not just storming our positions; they are deliberately and methodically destroying these towns and villages around them. Artillery, aviation, missiles. The Russian army has no shortage of means of destruction. And it can be stopped only by force.”

The European Union on Friday, meanwhile, extended its economic sanctions on Russia for the next six months. The decision affects a swath of sanctions imposed last year, from financial sanctions on Russian banks and its central bank to export and import bans.

There had been concerns that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban could push to weaken the sanctions package. In recent months, he has attacked the EU’s sanctions, especially the oil-import embargo on Moscow, saying they are more costly for Europe than for Russia. Decisions on sanctions are made by consensus among the EU’s 27 member states.

While Hungary stepped back from objecting to renewing the economic sanctions, it is pushing for the EU to drop sanctions on several Russian executives who have been blacklisted by the EU, according to several EU diplomats. A decision is due in March on rolling over these sanctions.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday that its forces had launched a series of strikes over the past day on Ukrainian military and infrastructure targets that had disrupted the transfer of weapons, including those from countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, being delivered to the front.

Kyiv’s allies are rushing to assemble two battalions’ worth of Leopard 2 tanks from a range of European countries after Germany and the U.S. committed to provide their own tanks. The initial battalion is expected to arrive in Ukraine within three months.

Poland, which has been at the forefront of pushing for increased military support for Ukraine, on Friday said it would send 60 upgraded T-72 tanks—half of them Polish-made PT-91 Twardy tanks—in addition to its contribution of 14 Leopards.

The U.S. has also pledged 31 M1 Abrams tanks, but those will take much longer to arrive in Ukraine because they are being procured through the defense industry instead of being pulled from existing American defense stocks.

Mr. Zelensky has urged Western countries to speed up the delivery of tanks and the training of Ukrainian forces to use them as Russia regains initiative.

Russian officials have said the tanks won’t alter dynamics on the battlefield and will only lead to escalation in the war.

Stefano Sannino, secretary-general of the EU’s European External Action Service, said during a visit to Japan that German and U.S. tank provisions weren’t escalatory and were meant to help Ukrainians defend themselves, rather than making them attackers. The decision to supply them is in response to Russian escalation, Mr. Sannino said, accusing Moscow of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilians and cities.

The tanks will enable Ukraine to destroy enemy tanks, offer greater protection and support combined operations, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense said. Assessing recent Russian claims of advances, the ministry said Russian forces had likely conducted local, probing attacks near Vuhledar in the east and Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region but that Russia hadn’t achieved substantial gains.

Russian military sources are deliberately spreading misinformation in an effort to imply that the Russian operation is sustaining momentum, the ministry said.