For weeks military experts and Russians have said it would be very short for the Russians to take over the town of Bakhmut, but the town has been fiercely fought over for months and the battle has been compared to a slaughterhouse .
Anders Puck Nielsen, a military expert at the Danish Defense Academy, said in an interview with TV2 that the situation had changed and there was no indication that the Russians would succeed in taking control of the city.
He said the situation changed about a week ago when the Ukrainians finally decided to stay in the city and defend it against invading forces. “It was simply decided to send more troops into the city and now they have managed to repel the Russians,” he said.
He said he was surprised at the development of the situation because for a long time it seemed that the Russians were going to take control of the city.
It has only been eleven days since Yevgeni Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner mercenary company, said the Russians had almost succeeded in encircling the town, with only one road open to access it.
Nielsen said there was no doubt that the Ukrainian objective was to weaken the Russian forces as much as possible by causing them heavy casualties at Bakhmut. “They just want to tire the Russians. By continuing to fight, they can inflict a lot of damage on Russia,” he said.
On TV2’s evening news on Tuesday night, the station’s Ukraine reporter said that according to Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Bakhmut, Russian combat tactics are appalling. Their soldiers are flocking to the Ukrainian defense lines and the numbers are so great each time that the only thing to do is try to get as much out of them as possible. But the problem for the Ukrainians is that the Russians are so numerous that the Ukrainians cannot load their guns once they have emptied them, and then the Russian soldiers come at them and kill them. So the Russians seem to be deliberately sending their soldiers into open death, counting on their numbers to be so great that they will eventually overwhelm the Ukrainians.
