A Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-25 over Bakhmut.
Russian and Ukrainian pilots are braving enemy air-defenses to fly close-air-support and air-defense sorties over Bakhmut, arguably the locus of fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in mid-January.
Videos that have circulated on social media in recent days depict Russian air force Sukhoi Su-25 attack planes and Ukrainian Su-25s and Sukhoi Su-27 interceptors roaring low over the ruined city, which remains under Ukrainian control despite eight months of relentless Russian attacks.
It’s obvious neither side controls the air over Bakhmut. It’s equally obvious both sides are, despite the risk, trying hard to gain local air-superiority. Russian air-defenses compel Ukrainian pilots to fly at rooftop height. Ukrainian air-defenses compel Russian pilots to fly just as low.
It’s Russia’s battle to lose. Ukrainian brigades steadily have dug in, in and around Bakhmut, since Russian forces—led by the shadowy mercenary firm The Wagner Group—first attacked the city last spring.
Bakhmut lacks obvious military value. For Wagner, the city perhaps is a symbol. In seizing the ruins of the nearly lifeless town, which lies 10 miles southwest of Russian-occupied Severodonetsk—one of Donbas’s bigger cities—Wagner apparently aims to establish itself as an alternative to the regular Russian army.
For the Ukrainians, Bakhmut is an opportunity to bleed Wagner of its fighting strength. For months, the mercenary firm has hurled battalion after battalion of under-trained troops—ex-convicts, mostly—at Ukrainian defenses in the Bakhmut sector.
“Their tactic is to send people to die,” Oleksandr Pohrebyskyy, a sergeant in the Ukrainian 46th Air Mobile Brigade, told Ukrainian Pravda.
The Ukrainians have killed thousands of Wagner fighters and stubbornly held on in Bakhmut, as the cost of many hundreds or thousands of casualties of their own.
In the settlement of Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, Wagner’s human-wave tactics actually worked. On Jan. 12, photos circulated online depicting Wagner fighters in Soledar’s iconic salt mines.
The fall of Soledar doesn’t necessarily mean Bakhmut is in imminent danger of falling, too. “The capture of the center and most of Soledar by Wagner units is an undoubted tactical success,” wrote Igor Girkin, a former Russian army officer who played a key role in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. “However, the enemy’s front was not broken through.”
“The battles for the city are not over yet—the western outskirts and suburbs will have to be stormed,” Girkin added. “The enemy command definitely controls the situation.”
Russian air force jets—perhaps flown by Wagner pilots—have bombed and rocketed Ukrainian positions in and around Bakhmut. Ukrainian jets meanwhile have struck Russian positions. It’s not apparent that the air raids have made a significant difference for either side. Artillery, not air power, is the big killer around Bakhmut.
But all those fighter pilots risking their lives over Bakhmut are evidence of the battle’s intensity. The Russian and Ukrainian air forces both have suffered losses in the Bakhmut sector. Neither air arm has called it quits.
Indeed, right now the battle for Bakhmut might represent the Ukrainian air force’s main line of effort. The air force went to war with no more than 34 ex-Soviet Su-27s—and has lost at least seven of them to Russian missiles.
That the Ukrainians are willing to risk some of their 27 remaining Su-27s, when there’s almost no prospect of replacing any of the jets they lose, speaks to their determination to defend Bakhmut.