This small Ukrainian city is the beating heart of the fight for our world

Bakhmut has morphed into a strategic gateway to Donbas: the greatest prize for Vladimir Putin, writes Bel Trew

Bakhmut is the key to taking the nearby Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk, like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk – if Bakhmut falls, the east falls (Reuters)

In Bakhmut, the shells land like clockwork. The sound splinters the dead grey air with a disturbing regularity. They claw up streets that dazed residents pick through on bicycles barely flinching.

Before the war, this eastern city was home to some 70,000 people, and internationally was pretty much unknown. After 10 months of war, only an eighth of the population remains as the area has faced the full fury of the Russian army, its affiliated proxies and mercenaries. The result is that the buildings look like sunken cathedrals; the roads are reefs of destruction.

There I met civilians living half-lives, half underground, building basement stoves to survive the winter. I met first responders fighting every day, at great risk to themselves, to try to keep the population alive.

This is because the city has morphed into a strategic gateway to Donbas: the greatest prize for Vladimir Putin. And so, since May, the Ukrainian army has fought hard to keep it in Ukrainian hands under the meat grinder of Russian artillery.

Of all the battles in this senseless war that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, perhaps the most important for the country is the fight to hold on to Bakhmut.

After Moscow’s men failed to take Kyiv, after they lost swathes of land captured in the north above Kharkiv, after they were forced to pull back across the river in the southern region of Kherson, the one target they have not wavered on has been consolidating the east of Ukraine: the heartland of Russia’s proxies in the country. That means holding the whole of Luhansk and capturing the rest of Donetsk.

Bakhmut is the key to taking the nearby Ukrainian-held cities in Donetsk, like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk – if Bakhmut falls, the east falls. The Ukrainians also know that the loss of even a metre of land, particularly in Russia’s proxy stronghold in the east, is just another potential war down the road.

As the Russians have repeatedly demonstrated, they take ground, consolidate, and use it as a diving board for fresh offensives. More so than anywhere in the country, Donbas is now their prime goal. And that is why Volodymyr Zelensky, on his visit to the US (the first time he has left Ukraine since the start of the invasion), not only spotlighted Bakhmut in a cleverly worded speech, but ensured he had visited the city just before the trip to add credence to his words.

He knows his audience very well, and was of course lobbying for more weaponry. Comparing the battle for Bakhmut to the Battle of Saratoga, the turning point in the American War of Independence, Zelensky said this fight “will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom”.

Repeatedly positioning Bakhmut as a Ukrainian “stronghold”, he said the fight to retain control of it was a battle for the freedom of the world. While visiting the city, he had called it “the fortress of our morale”, adding: “Freedom is being defended here for all of us.”

This line has been pushed forward by Zelensky’s office. In a recent op-ed for the Atlantic Council think tank, Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the President, argued that Bakhmut had become “a powerful symbol of the global fight for freedom taking place in our country”.

He wrote: “Today, Ukraine is the main battlefield in the global struggle against resurgent authoritarianism.” Bakhmut, he went on, was a “fortress of freedom” in that.

The Ukrainians are of course pushing for more weapons, and it is a clever political framing to position the little city of Bakhmut as the front line for the security and values of Europe, the West and the world. Politicalisation aside, it is being spoken of as if it were the new Mariupol, but the difference is it can be saved, and because of this I believe it will determine what happens in Ukraine as a whole.

In Bakhmut, speaking to the firefighters, the first responders and the residents still left there, it is clear that the city is fragile, it is under heavy fire, and that what happens there is critical. Perhaps this small city might be the centre of the fight for our world?