Bakhmout has become the symbol of a total war, where the Russians spend lavishly. On the defensive and lacking ammunition, the army of kyiv resists with the means at hand.
They hide three meters below the ground. In the dark, the soldiers sleep, read, eat, pass the time as best they can, until an order reaches them. “Can you hear me? – I can hear you five out of five.” The liaison officer then turns on his tablet.
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Using a drone, the officer observes the target in real time. The objective of the morning, for these Ukrainian soldiers engaged in the battle of Bakhmout, in eastern Ukraine, is a BMP, a Russian infantry fighting vehicle, fourteen kilometers from their position. “We have scouts who go behind enemy lines to spy. Drones improve detection, but in the end it’s the same result”, he explains. You then have to walk 500 meters in the mud to the Soviet-made MSTA-S cannon. Five gunners settle down. “The cannon is loaded, the target in sight. Pull back, over there! Fire!”
Two of the six guns of the unit stopped, due to lack of ammunition
We are deviating a bit from the canon. You shouldn’t stay here right after the shot. We must leave quickly. “It’s safer. The enemy has radars and it detects the origin of the shots. And then they target us. It should happen soon”, explains the head of this unit. He leads 74 men spread over six positions south of Bakhmout. “The Russians have a lot more ammunition than us. They fire massively on our positions. We can’t respond to each of their shells. That’s why we fire less, but more precisely.”
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The question of the fall of Bakhmout is becoming more and more pressing. “We cannot exclude it in the days to come”, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday (March 8), speaking to the press before the start of an informal meeting of European Union defense ministers. On the ground, the paramilitary group Wagner claimed the capture of the eastern part of the city. In the suburbs, infantry hand-to-hand combat continued under continuous artillery fire.
“We no longer have 152 mm Soviet-type shellsconfirms our head of unit. The factories no longer produce it. We now need NATO standard guns and the 155mm shells to match.” Since the beginning of winter, two of the six guns of his unit have been idle for lack of ammunition.
Our special correspondents Thibault Lefèvre and Éric Audra immersed with a unit of Ukrainian artillerymen south of Bakhmout.
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