A kettle. A cauldron. A pincer. A meat grinder. A carpet of corpses. A death trap.
A decisive battle?
Since at least August, a motley crew of Russian regular forces and soldiers from the notorious Wagner private mercenary company have been throwing World-War-I-style waves of infantry at Bakhmut, trying to dislodge Ukraine’s entrenched defense from the small city in the eastern Donetsk region.
That fighting was eclipsed in recent months by Ukraine’s counteroffensives to the north, in the Kharkiv region, and to the southwest, around Kherson, on the west bank of the Dnieper River.
