- The months-long battle for Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, was the longest and bloodiest of the war.
- Many in the West, including Ukraine's allies, urged it to give up on its defense of the city.
Ukraine fought tooth and nail for months to defend the eastern city of Bakhmut from a never-ending onslaught of Russian soldiers and Wagner Group mercenaries. The fighting, which claimed thousands of lives on both sides, was so brutal in nature that it was characterized as a "slaughter-fest" or "the meat grinder."
Kyiv dismissed skepticism at home and abroad and calls for it to rethink its approach to the city's defense, including calls from its Western allies to consider withdrawing and focus the effort elsewhere along the front lines.
The risky decision to stay there came with significant costs, and Moscow eventually captured the city in May. But war experts say that it paid off for Ukraine, both at the time and in the months that have followed.
The decision to fight for Bakhmut "had some pretty serious ramifications," George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider. Had Ukraine not stuck it out, Russia might never have experienced a number of important problems that degraded the country's war machine during and after the battle.
By staying and fighting in Bakhmut, Kyiv managed to stop Russia from moving deeper into eastern Ukraine, pin down large elements of the Russian military, including more elite units like Moscow's airborne forces, and hinder Russia's ability to maintain a large strategic reserve.
Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine Corps colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic International Studies, said Ukraine exhausted Russian forces during the battle for Bakhmut and denied Moscow the opportunity to make more significant territorial progress.
"The Russians bled themselves in trying to take Bakhmut," he told Business Insider.
He added that there were also political and symbolic elements to staying there, because regardless of its tactical and operational significance, losing the city without putting up a fight would have been discouraging and a blow to morale.
The Bakhmut fight also greatly contributed to the ultimate downfall of the notorious Wagner Group, Barros and Cancian said. Efforts to capture the city were largely carried out by the ruthless mercenaries, which also took the brunt of the casualties — relying on poorly trained convicts and gruesome human wave tactics.
During Wagner's months-long fight for Bakhmut, rifts behind the scenes between the mercenary group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Russia's military leadership began to emerge publicly.
Prigozhin regularly bashed the top brass over issues like battlefield incompetence and a lack of ammunition and supplies, and after claiming responsibility for capturing the city in mid-May, he revealed that over 20,000 of his fighters had been killed there, putting the blame for their deaths on the military leadership in Moscow.
"There's no question that Wagner battered its head against Bakhmut," Cancian said, adding that doing so "ultimately shattered the organization" from a military and political perspective.
The battle took such a toll on the group, that in the aftermath, rather than continue to push forward, the group was forced to withdraw to the rear to rest, rearm, and reconstitute.
No longer a front-line force leading the charge, Prigozhin maintained his and Wagner's relevance among ultranationalist supporters by continuing to stir up trouble with the Russian defense ministry.
As the military attempted to clamp down on Wagner, longstanding tensions between Wagner and the Russian military leadership eventually boiled over in June, when Prigozhin took an unusually bold step and led a short-lived mutiny against Moscow's military leadership.
This revolt shook the Kremlin and led to purges within and more oversight and control of Wagner by the Russian state. Then Prigozhin died suspiciously in an August plane crash.
Barros said it's not clear to him that Prigozhin would be dead and the Wagner Group subsumed by Russia had the organization not participated in the battle for Bakhmut the way that Moscow allowed it to.
The mercenary leader essentially "used the prominence of his fighters in taking Bakhmut, which would not have been possible without the Wagner Group, to elevate his own position," Barros added. Then he flew too close to the sun.
"It's very difficult to see the series of events that led to Prigozhin's rise and demise happening without the Bakhmut arc," he said, arguing "that is crucial to this whole story."
Questions remain over how much of the combat power that Ukraine sent to Bakhmut was actually needed. There are also questions of whether or not it should have pulled experienced fighters back to positions where Kyiv's forces were gearing up for their summer counteroffensive and integrated them into those preparations. It is difficult to say what was the right move.
Ukraine has made some territorial gains in the south during its counteroffensive, and it even breached Russia's formidable Surovikin Line, a complicated network of defensive fortifications. But it has largely struggled to retake much of the Moscow-held territory that Kyiv was hoping to take back at the start.
Barros argued having more or better forces would not have necessarily made the counteroffensive any more successful because there were already too many flawed fundamental planning assumptions about breaching Russia's defensive positions and the weapons that would be needed to most effectively do so. The realities would have still been true regardless of what kind of troops were there and potentially taking the lead on the assault.
"Even if you were to look at what in theory the Ukrainians had, it doesn't fix the problems with the southern counteroffensive," Barros said. "I think the southern counteroffensive likely would've experienced the same problems nonetheless."
Despite facing setbacks in its counteroffensive, at the same time, Ukraine has found plenty of success around the occupied Crimean peninsula, where Ukraine battered Russia's Black Sea Fleet with naval drones and long-range cruise missiles.
More recently, Kyiv's forces seem to have made some progress by conducting operations on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, near Kherson, a natural barrier that Moscow long enjoyed to its advantage. Its another risky fight, and it remains to be seen how it all plays out.