How Ukraine lost Bakhmut and Russia won a hollow victory

When Yuriy Stetskiv pulled into Bakhmut at the end of April, the mission was to cling on for as long as possible.

Stetskiv, a deputy chief of staff of Ukraine’s 135th Separate Territorial Defense Battalion, had orders to establish a command post on the western edge of the city and defend the last few blocks still in Ukrainian hands.

Artillery fire crashed around him as he approached the city. Inside his armored vehicle — an eight-seater, overstuffed with 12 soldiers — his men quietly prayed in the dark.

They stopped and the doors opened. Then it was all noise.

“I can see that everybody’s shooting, everything is firing, everywhere is bombing,” Stetskiv recalled.

“And somebody is just crying: ‘Go here! Go here to the basement!'”

With the city under heavy bombardment, Stetskiv’s maps were useless.

It was almost impossible to know what was where. Explosions seemed to come from every direction and surveillance drones circled overhead.

In early May, Ukraine accused Russia of dropping white phosphorus, a deadly substance that ignites fast-spreading fires that are difficult to put out. (Russia has denied this. Its use in civilian areas is banned under international law.) Stetskiv said there was an eerie beauty as he watched munitions rain down on the city and compared them to Fourth of July fireworks.

“Sometimes awful things are beautiful,” he said.

Over a year of fierce fighting, first in the outskirts, then increasingly in the city itself, Bakhmut had become the longest and bloodiest battle since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — a “meat grinder” for tens of thousands of soldiers.

The paradox is that Bakhmut never had the strategic importance of Kyiv, the capital, or the port city of Odesa, or Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, or even Donetsk, the regional capital some 50 miles north of Bakhmut. The former mining city was best known for its sparkling wine and the roses that filled its most picturesque street each summer.

Yet Bakhmut became a fight that neither side was willing to lose, and a symbol of each side's unyielding determination. It was "one of those battles that had no strategic value at first glance, but gradually assumed value just because political leaders invested value in it," said Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian Army who is now a military commentator.

This account of Ukraine's fight to hold Bakhmut is based on interviews with more than 45 soldiers, civilians, medics, and military analysts. Business Insider also drew on open-source and official accounts, body camera and drone footage, briefings, and intelligence assessments. Russian officials did not respond to repeated attempts seeking comment.

Soon after Stetskiv's last stand, Russian forces, led by Wagner Group mercenaries, finally pried the city from Ukraine's grasp and transferred its positions to the Russian army. By then, Bakhmut's destruction was near total, reminiscent, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, of Hiroshima after the atomic blast in 1945.

Thousands of men and women had been sent into this fight, and yet it's done little to alter the course of this slow and increasingly desperate war.

A city of wine and roses

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Bakhmut had a population of about 70,000. Sixty miles from the Russian border in the Donbas, Bakhmut was a small and tidy city, with a pleasant riverfront.

A few years earlier, it had set a record for "the largest number of roses in one location" after 5,000 flowers were counted along its Rose Alley. It hosted Artwinery, a major producer of sparkling wine in Eastern Europe.

Now, two days before Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, Natasha Zhukova, 44, was at home on Yuvileyna Street, weighing her options.

A journalist with the local radio station, Zhukova had been covering the fighting that had torn through eastern Ukraine since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began a grinding battle to "liberate" the Donbas. That spring, separatists had briefly seized parts of Bakhmut but were repulsed by Ukrainian forces.

Reports of a huge Russian troop buildup gave Zhukova a bad feeling. She packed up a few treasured possessions, like photos of her beloved late father, and fled west with her child, eventually ending up in Germany. Months later, as Zhukova monitored the situation in Bakhmut from afar, she would learn that her home had been hit. She suspects her father's grave will be impossible to find amid the devastation.

In the first three months, some three-quarters of Bakhmut's population left too. The city was regularly hit by blasts fired from a distance, but it was difficult to know which way things would go.

Vladimir Epik, a 68-year-old music teacher, was standing in his garden on Mariupolskaya Street in April when he saw a missile sail over his house. It injured someone he knew, and Epik left Bakhmut soon after.

A few weeks after that, a missile crashed next to the home of Natalya Zhyvnovytska in the nearby village of Zvanivka, ripping off its roof. She left soon after that.

Yevheny Vakulenko, a colleague of Zukhova's, stayed longer than most. He watched as the big supermarkets closed one by one. Some of the smaller shops stayed open, but fresh fruits and vegetables were scarce. As the fighting got closer, he saw barricades being erected in the streets. Shelling regularly knocked out the electrical system, leaving him without power for hours at a time.

By the end of May, he was gone too.

Needing a win

The idea that Russia would capture Kyiv in a lightning offensive at the start of its "special military operation" had fallen apart almost immediately.

Russia's focus moved east.

In May, as the fighting seemed to be getting closer to Bakhmut, Russia claimed its biggest victory yet, some 130 miles to the south — taking the strategic port city of Mariupol. Farther north, Russian forces captured Lyman, a rail hub leading into the Donbas just 30 miles north of Bakhmut, and then Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, 30 miles to the northeast.

"So they're thinking: 'Right, we take Bakhmut, and then the next stop is Kramatorsk and Sloviansk,'" said Patrick Bury, a military analyst.

But instead, Russia's progress stalled.

The Kremlin's desperation was on view on September 30, when President Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, including Donetsk, where Bakhmut is located. This was bluster, since much of that territory was still in Ukrainian hands. The very next day, on October 1, Ukraine retook Lyman.

This is where Yevgeny Prigozhin took a major role. Prigozhin, Putin's one-time caterer, had founded the Wagner Group to help Russia's incursion into Ukraine after 2014. The mercenaries were known to take on the hard fighting Moscow's professional soldiers tended to avoid. According to a chronology of events that Prigozhin would later post on Telegram, Wagner forces were called to Luhansk, east of Bakhmut, on March 19. After claiming wins in Luhansk in July, they started moving toward Bakhmut in October.

As the pace of fighting increased, the Russian newspaper Izvestia ran a story making the case that Russia's had a centuries-long claim to Bakhmut, which it referred to by its Soviet-era name. "The history of Artyomovsk is inextricably linked with the history of the Russian Empire," the newspaper proclaimed.

Bakhmut had become a rare front line where Russia might have the upper hand. And, with each passing week with no major territorial advances, the city's symbolic importance seemed to grow.

"It was clear that this was going to be a hot zone at some point, and there was already fighting," said Klara Lisinski, a journalist and volunteer. "But no one really knew, including me, that this was going to become the symbol of the war."

Defending the asphalt plant

By October, the Russian front line had reached a stretch of the E40 highway, about 2 miles to the east of Bakhmut, open-source assessments from the time show. They were also approaching from the southeast.

Jutting out into that gap, about a mile and a half from the city limits, was an asphalt plant — a scattering of low industrial buildings less than a mile from end to end.

To reach it — whether to bring in supplies, evacuate the wounded, or rotate troops in and out — Ukrainian forces had to speed along a road through open fields. With nowhere to take cover, they tended to make these trips at dawn when visibility was low. The rising sun would dazzle them as they sped uphill along the already-ruined road, on tires frayed to almost nothing.

Stopping was not an option, said Oleh Holubenko, a captain with the 241st Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces.

"You will be killed immediately by their artillery and their rockets."

Holding down the plant was Ukraine's 93rd Mechanized Brigade, along with 89 soldiers from Holubenko's unit.

On about October 5, Holubenko's soldiers were pulled into a grinding 18-hour battle.

A group of soldiers of the 93rd, clustered at the eastern end of the plant, needed to rotate out some troops. Crucially, also, they needed fresh batteries to keep up radio communications.

One of Holubenko's soldiers — known by the call sign Shuba, or fur coat — knew the route well. So Holubenko sent him out with a fresh battery to show the way to a couple of fresh troops.

But Shuba never came back. His own radio went silent.

Holubenko sent a small team after him to investigate. They didn't find Shuba, or anyone from the 93rd. But on their way they did find the body of a Russian soldier — an ominous sign the enemy had penetrated the grounds.

It was too dark to see anything. The next morning, when Holubenko sent up a surveillance drone, he got a better sense of what had probably happened. Russian troops had sneaked onto the eastern end of the plant and had the main group of troops of the 93rd surrounded. Without Shuba's fresh battery, the 93rd hadn't been able to alert anyone.

The Russians had set up a machine gun, barring them from storming the area.

Holubenko called in tank, mortar, and artillery fire to target the Russian attackers. His soldiers fought for hours, he said — never knowing exactly where Shuba, or the fighters of the 93rd, might be, and worried the enemy might have captured his radio.

Later, after they repelled the Russians, they found Shuba's body in a basement, not far from where they had spotted the Russian body. Holubenko believes Shuba had killed the Russian before succumbing to his injuries. Shuba still held onto the precious radio.

They were able to hold down the asphalt plant for another few days before they were forced to retreat.

Russia's advance had been delayed, but not stopped.

Wagner Zombies

As winter set in, Bakhmut and the surrounding area was being described as "the most bloody, cruel, and brutal" front of the war.

Months of Russia's long-range attacks were leaving the city in ruins, and there were reports from both sides that fierce fighting had broken out in its outskirts.

Farther out, Ukrainian soldiers were engaging in close-range trench warfare to stop Russia's advance.

With surveillance drones hovering over the fields and forests surrounding Bakhmut, these trenches could be the only place to take cover.

At turns muddy and bitterly cold, they were often just a short distance from enemy lines. It was a brutal way of fighting that drew comparisons to World War I.

Troy Offenbecker, a US Marine veteran who joined Ukraine's International Legion, remembers having the same thought every time he was driven into the area that December: "Motherfucker, this is probably the last 10 minutes of my life."

"The second the door opened, you'd hear the artillery smashing, you'd hear rockets flying," he said.

The brutal winter conditions added to the misery of holding down a trench. "You're being stagnant, the cold eats you," Offenbecker said.

Katerina Zirka, a Ukrainian combat medic, said many soldiers died of hypothermia that winter.

There were also shortages of the most basic battlefield supplies, like tourniquets. "This is why so many people are dying, because of bleeding," Zirka said.

Russia's advantages were also becoming clearer. The Russians seemed to have more artillery and more fighters. Their military setbacks, like their withdrawal from Kherson, had freed up soldiers to pile into Bakhmut.

By December, Wagner received the first significant deployment of fighters recruited from Russia's prisons.

Their numbers would eventually swell to 50,000 ex-convicts, by Prigozhin's estimate — identifiable by the letter "K" sewn into their uniforms.

According to Ukrainian fighters who faced off against them in Bakhmut, these unskilled combatants would form the first wave of fighters, to be followed by Wagner's elite forces.

Ukrainians took to calling them "zombies."

"I don't know what kind of motivations they have — but they are completely fearless," Stepan Golian, a special-forces sniper, said through an interpreter. "They walk through an open field and they just walk and walk."

Golian said that when he and others had searched the bodies of fallen Wagner fighters, they'd found "some unknown substance" on almost everyone, which they surmised may be drugs. Though widely rumored, the charge that ex-convicts in Wagner's ranks were on drugs has yet to be confirmed.

Russian forces also seemed to have a much larger supply of powerful, long-range military-grade drones. Ukrainian fighters told BI that to close the gap they had resorted to crowdfunding.

Oleksandr Pleskov, a soldier in Ukraine's 125th Brigade, recalled one night when his team lost an advanced drone, worth $6,000, and risked his life to get it back.

"We had to sneak out and go and find it, because this drone was really valuable," he said, through an interpreter. It was an example of "stupidity and audacity," he said — but they recovered the drone.

Holubenko, the captain at the asphalt plant, said Ukrainian forces also relied heavily on "wedding drones" — consumer-grade gadgets that in normal times would record life's happiest moments.

Holubenko said his unit made grenade casings from a 3D printer, and then adapted each drone to release a grenade by switching on its light and a second grenade by switching it off.

A New Year's offensive

On December 20 of last year, Zelenskyy paid a surprise visit to Bakhmut and posted a video showing him handing out medals to reward his "superhuman" troops.

The scene drew a furious reaction from Russia's ultranationalists, who were already incensed at the slow pace of progress in Bakhmut. Kremlevskaya prachka, the popular nationalist Telegram channel that translates to Kremlin laundry, chided Zelenskyy for staying in Bakhmut for only a few hours before returning to his warm office while "ordinary soldiers were left in a deplorable, hopeless situation to die." Putin, though, has not gone close to the city.

Meanwhile, from the Ukrainian side, an intense appetite for news from the front lines was making social-media celebrities out of some Ukrainian fighters.

One of them was Olga Bigar, a charismatic mortar platoon commander who posted to her large following on TikTok as the "Witch of Bakhmut."

Formerly a lawyer and doctoral student in Kyiv when the war broke out, Bigar had enlisted almost immediately after the Russian invasion. She had arrived at the front in Bakhmut that summer, and had been part of the defense of the asphalt plant.

Bigar was convinced that Russian soldiers had been tasked with taking the city by New Year's. Sure enough, in the opening hours of 2023, Bigars said, her platoon faced wave after wave of Wagner fighters.

As they'd later discover, this was part of a massive barrage of attacks aimed at multiple Ukrainian cities at the turn of the new year.

Again, though, Russia's progress stalled. Prigozhin posted a video in which he was seen with the bodies of fallen fighters. His forces, he said, were sometimes spending more than a day fighting for a single house.

Russian forces were, however, faring better in Soledar, a nearby town of some 10,000 people best known for its cavernous salt mines, declaring victory there on February 13. While the win didn't carry much strategic importance, it marked the first significant territorial seizure in all of Ukraine since July.

But even in victory, Prigozhin and Russia's top military brass were feuding over who deserved credit.

"I want to emphasize that no units except for the fighters of the Wagner PMC took part in the assault on Soledar," Prigozhin said.

That same month, the Wagner boss published a video of himself in the cockpit of a Su-24 bomber, challenging Zelenskyy to an aerial duel.

"Tomorrow, I will fly a MiG-29. If you so desire, let's meet in the skies," Prigozhin taunted. "If you win, you take Artyomovsk. If not, we advance till Dnipro."

Strike at a hospital

On the night of January 24, the first missile hit the Bakhmut Children's Hospital at about 11 p.m.

Children were no longer being treated there. Instead, the facility on the western edge of the city had been turned into a stabilization point where wounded soldiers were given emergency treatment while awaiting evacuation to regular hospitals.

Olena, a surgery nurse, had taken cover from the shelling that preceded it and watched the explosion through a hole in the wall. She grabbed her husband, a doctor, and they ran to their car as the second missile landed. Russian artillery rounds struck around them.

Khrystyna, a surgery assistant, had been taking cover from the artillery fire in the basement and eventually managed to escape from the hospital.

When she returned the next morning, Khrystyna learned that two doctors, a paramedic, and a driver had been killed. Among them was a doctor she'd been working alongside an hour before the attack had started. Part of his scalp had been blown off, leaving his brain exposed.

Ismahilov Said, a paramedic, had arrived at the scene and found scattered body parts, frozen solid from the cold. He took a series of graphic pictures showing chunks of flesh and blood smattering the inside of a damaged vehicle.

The blasts had knocked out windows and left a huge hole in the side of the hospital.

If the Bakhmut Children's Hospital was deliberately targeted that night, as interviews with eyewitnesses suggest is possible, it could constitute a war crime. The World Health Organization has recorded more than 1,000 Russian attacks on healthcare targets in Ukraine as of May. The attack on the Bakhmut Children's Hospital has not been previously reported.

The medics said they had little time to mourn. They gathered what supplies they could and moved on to their next location, leaving the hospital behind in the crumbling city.

No tears

Alina Sarnatska, a combat medic with the Territorial Defense Forces, remembers one especially difficult day very late in the fight when she was tasked with identifying and labeling "Cargo 200" — a Soviet-era term for war dead.

They were short on paper, except for some art affixed to the wall of the stabilization point that Ukrainian children had sent to cheer up the troops. Drawings of flags and tanks and "Glory to Ukraine!" were scrawled across them.

Sarnatska, who had worked as a coordinator of a women's-rights NGO before signing up, took one down and tore it up to make name tags.

Sarnatska next turned to the bodies. She had barely started when she jumped back, screaming. One of the hands was familiar, and she realized it belonged to her best friend. Composing herself, she stepped aside so a superior could take over.

She rarely let the cracks show even in the face of such tragedy, saying there was a strong culture of putting on a brave face. "We are not allowed to cry," she said, speaking through an interpreter.

As the attack on the Bakhmut Children's Hospital showed, the jobs of medics could be as dangerous as the soldiers'.

Eventually, medics like Sarnatska were no longer permitted to go out to evacuate wounded fighters. A doctor's vehicle, she was told, had been struck as it sped towards an evacuation zone. The impact had sent the car flying into the first floor of a building. It took a month to retrieve the body.

Sarnatska underlined the risk: "If we send four medical crews to evacuate, two of them will never return," she said."

A mad dash out

Amid so much intense fighting, thousands of civilians were still hunkered down in and around Bakhmut. Some were too old or sick to leave, or in denial about how dangerous it was to stay. Others saw the Russians as liberators and welcomed their advance.

Borys Khmelevskiy, who trains combat medics, remembers driving through Bakhmut one day late in 2022. Explosions seemed to be going off all around him. Even in an armored car, he was scared. Then, he saw something that made his eyes go wide.

"On the same road, coming in the opposite direction, there's this old woman cycling with two packets of milk," he said.

"And you're like, what the fuck? Like, how are you still alive?"

The city set up what was known as "invincibility centers" to offer help to residents without electricity, power, or running water. Volunteers kept their eyes and ears open for civilians who requested an evacuation.

One of the last chances to leave Bakhmut was roughly January 25, said Lisinski, the journalist, and Daniel Beiler, another volunteer. A few days after that, the city was closed to aid groups.

By then, according to the regional governor, fewer than 8,000 civilians remained in the city.

People's determination to stay left some of the rescuers perplexed. Some stayed even when they "should all be climbing into your van and literally pounding on the glass — 'take me with you, take me with you," said Lisinski.

Instead, she said, "they ask me, 'Can you still buy gum in the store?'"

"They ask me, 'Can you still buy gum in the store?' And I'm saying, 'There's no store.'"

Volunteers traveled in regular cars, rather than armored vehicles, and risked their lives making these trips in and out of Bakhmut.

"The best asset we have is speed," said Mick, an Australian volunteer. When moving through areas where they could be shot at, this could mean gunning it to 110 mph.

Pancakes and wine

Mick remembers one especially surreal rescue in Chasiv Yar, the town about 9 miles west of Bakhmut along Highway O-0506. By the winter, much of it was destroyed, and Mick and a colleague had come to evacuate an older couple.

Smoke was pouring out of ruined homes and they worried they'd arrived too late.

"Every building was destroyed. Every single one," Mick said. "I had this sadness and anger at myself for not getting there earlier," he added. It looked as if there was no one there to save.

Mick leaned on the car's horn, hoping for a miracle.

Some 100 feet ahead, "this little old lady comes wandering out of her house," he said. "And she looks at us, gives a massive wave with a big smile on her face."

She led them into her home, where they met the woman's husband and were treated to breakfast.

"These big fat fluffy pancakes that they make here that are delicious, homemade honey, tea, home-harvested milk," Mick recalled. There was even wine, made from grapes that grew in their garden.

Mick and his colleague sat down and ate. "It was the strangest feeling," he said.

Afterward, they brought the woman to safety, but her husband wanted to stay. The military rescued him a few days later, Mick said.

A reckoning

The Battle of Bakhmut was still grinding on, and neither side was letting up.

Prigozhin's dissatisfaction with the top brass was increasingly spilling from his social-media accounts. A voluble critic of how the war in Ukraine was being waged, the mercenary leader blamed Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russia's military, for Wagner's growing death toll in Bakhmut and accused them of failing to properly equip his forces.

Yet the consensus was that Russia had Ukraine on the back foot. Both sides were taking heavy casualties, even if, by a NATO estimate, Ukraine was taking out five Russians in Bakhmut for each of its own losses.

Questions about the wisdom of Ukraine's strategy in Bakhmut were also bursting out into the open. US officials were said to have been advising Ukraine to withdraw for months, citing Ukraine's heavy casualties. The Pentagon was now saying publicly that abandoning Bakhmut would not be a "setback" for the larger fight.

"I think it is more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value," US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in early March.

Zelenskyy was doubling down. Speaking with CNN, he said abandoning Bakhmut would leave an "open road" to other territorial gains. After he'd conferred with his military chiefs, more soldiers were being brought in.

Even if Bakhmut wasn't a strategic must-win, Ukrainians saw Bakhmut as a honeypot for depleting Russian soldiers and artillery, and relieving some pressure on front lines elsewhere. Engaging them in Bakhmut would thin their ranks elsewhere, especially as Ukraine readied its counteroffensive.

Indeed, "Bakhmut holds" had become a rallying cry.

"A lot of people were talking about 'just give them Bakhmut,'" and retake it later, Daniel Husach, of Ukraine's 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, who fought there in March, told BI. "But they do not know that counterattack, especially the city, requires so much resources."

"It's always harder to retake each meter of our land than defend it," he said.

Roads of Life

By the spring of this year, Russian forces had surrounded Bakhmut from the east, south, and north. "The pincers are getting tighter," Progozhin said in a video.

To lose the roads would be to lose the city. Ukraine was fighting desperately to hold down the roads leading into the western part of the city, which were necessary to bring in supplies and reinforcements.

The main route, Highway T-0504, became known as the Road of Life.

Highway O-0506, which curved northwest out to Chasiv Yar, became another scene of fierce fighting. Ukrainians moved between trenches and thin stretches of forest to beat back the Russian advance.

First Lt. Oleksandr Yabchanka, a pediatrician before he became a platoon commander, was among those defending the road to Chasiv Yar.

"I wasn't born for this," he said "I have a very peaceful profession. I am a kid's doctor."

But he added: "They have killed a lot of children and if I don't kill them they will kill a lot more of us."

With his troops facing multiple direct assaults a day and regular poundings from artillery, it was "hell on earth," he said.

On April 9, Yabchanka's small platoon was inside a trench that was 5 ½ feet deep. They had given it the grim nickname Zhmur, or Corpse, since the frozen bodies of four Russian soldiers were there too, pushed to the edge and buried under some dirt.

That day, Yabchanka returned to the trench to find two of his comrades dead. Others in the dugout seemed frozen in shock. What happened next was captured by body cameras worn by Yabchanka and their platoon leader, who was known by his call sign Tihiyy — "the quiet one."

There was another explosion, knocking a soldier off his feet. Over the radio, word came that Russians had entered a nearby Ukrainian trench.

Yabchanka's men fired from their dugout, and then moved toward the treeline. They could see Russian soldiers closing in. Tihiyy called out orders — to shoot, to get into a nearby trench, to hold their positions — as they took shelter behind whatever stumps or mounds of earth they could spot.

Eventually, the onslaught had stopped, and the nearby trenches were all back in Ukrainian hands. Tihiyy celebrated into the scarred surroundings, hoarsely yelling: "It's our field, fuck off."

Tihiyy was killed just a few weeks later, and Yabchanka says he now fights in his memory. "I must do everything so that their life is not wasted for nothing," he said. "We must seize victory in this war."

The Nest

As spring advanced, Ukraine's hopes of holding Bakhmut were evaporating. For the soldiers stationed there, the goalpost had shifted: Hold on for as long as possible.

Jackie, a US Army veteran of urban warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, arrived in Bakhmut in April as part of Ukraine's 135th Battalion. While he officially served as a military instructor, he said he joined the fighting as well. (He asked to be referred to by his call sign.)

Jackie was stationed in "the Nest" — a few blocks on the western edge of Bakhmut that linked the city and the Road of Life.

Soldiers would take cover and fire from abandoned homes now frozen in time, with wedding photos and books still on the shelves.

Ukraine had lost most of the city, and Jackie said he knew Ukraine couldn't hold it: Instead the job was to wipe out as many enemy troops as possible knowing a withdrawal would eventually come.

With Russia's artillery advantage, he said, "It didn't make any sense why they couldn't consolidate the city."

His assessment of Russia's chances were echoed by Alexander Kots, the Russian war blogger who runs the Kotsnews Telegram channel and appears frequently on Russia's Channel One.

"The enemy is still actively resisting in the western outskirts of the city, clinging to every brick," Kots, who posted from in and around Bakhmut through much of the battle, said on April 13.

"Even from a burning house — he doesn't want to give up, as we saw for ourselves. The musicians of Wagner PMC are confidently moving forward, without stopping the pressure. The flanks are being covered by landing forces and artillery of the Russian Armed Forces. Bakhmut will be Russian."

One thing that made this fight so perilous was that it was challenging to know where the lines were.

Even in Iraq, there was space to breathe, to move troops and ammunition behind the line of contact.

"You could stand outside and have a barbecue, a sandwich and drink," Jackie said.

But in Bakhmut, it was hard to say who was where.

"If you just watched a video recording of Bakhmut for an hour during a random day — the line of contact, you would not see it," he said.

Soldiers on both sides sheltered in the basements and lower floors of the city's sturdy Soviet-era buildings.

They were well-fortified, and the lower down they were the less likely it was they would be spotted and fired at.

Then again, if a building were brought down, they could all die under the rubble.

Adding to the chaos, "hundreds" of drones populated the skies, Jackie said, each a watchful eye connected to deadly weapons, like an artillery system or a T-72 tank, stationed off in the distance.

A brief respite from the surveillance came twice a day — for an hour in the morning, when quadcopters with ordinary sights were installed for daytime surveillance, and for an hour at night, when they'd be replaced by fixed-wing drones with thermal optics.

Soldiers would use the time to take up new defensive positions, rotate into the Nest, or head back to their barracks.

"Russians, Ukrainians, everybody gets up out of their holes and start running around," Jackie said.

The last stand

By the time Stetskiv rolled into Bakhmut with orders to set up a command center and defend the last Ukrainian-held blocks in the city, everyone's mind was on May 9.

Victory Day, as it's known in Russia, commemorates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. With Ukrainian forces holding onto the last sliver of western Bakhmut by a thread, it was widely assumed Russia would throw everything at them, to mark the triumph at their Victory Day parades.

On May 5, Prigozhin posted a video on Telegram threatening to pull out of Bakhmut if he wasn't given more supplies. "The military bureaucrats halted all supplies from May 1," Prigozhin claimed — which, if true, would have stymied his efforts to win the city ahead of Victory Day celebrations.

Standing next to a row of dead soldiers, he called out: "Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the fuck is our ammunition?"

May 9 came and went without Russia taking the city.

On May 10, Ukraine's 3rd Separate Assault Brigade shared footage of Russian troops fleeing across fields in Bakhmut's outskirts in a rout that Prigozhin said took out 500 soldiers.

But life did not get any easier for the last holdouts of Bakhmut. A couple of blocks ahead of Stetskiv's command post, one of the soldiers under his command, Bohdan Yatsun, was holding a building at the fringes of Ukraine's control.

"We had two aims," Yatsun, 47, a former NGO worker and local politician, said through an interpreter. "Number one, complete the task. Number two, survive. But to be truthful, they are equally important."

They had no doubt, he said, that they "were moving between life and death, and that death can come any moment, absolutely any moment."

On May 15, Prigozhin was forced to deny a report that he proposed sharing Russian intelligence with Kyiv in exchange for ceding territory around Bakhmut.

The next day, Stetskiv, sick with pneumonia, was evacuated.

Jackie had also been evacuated, and his troops withdrew on May 17 in what he described as a "pretty desperate exit."

"Everybody could barely talk because of all the smoke inhalation, everybody had concussions," he said.

"Everybody was like they had just gotten out of 40 roller coasters in a row. They were like zombies."

Four days after that, on May 20, Prigozhin formally declared victory in Bakhmut, announcing that Wagner would be transferring its positions to regular Russian soldiers. Images of Prigozhin visiting the Artwinery cellars, and inspecting the "millions of bottles," appeared on his Telegram channel.

Over on Russian state TV, Channel One was in overdrive, comparing Russia's victory in Bakhmut to Berlin's fall to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. One of its correspondents said he and his camera crew reported seeing "banners over the city" and "the joy of our soldiers, like our grandfathers in 1945."

"In Bakhmut, force stood against force," a military analyst and reserve army colonel, Alexander Lifanov, said in an interview with the Russian website KM.Ru. "Russian readiness for self-sacrifice conquered Ukrainian obstinacy, animal Russophobia, and furious disbelief in the fickleness of fate."

Asked why it took Russia so long to take Bakhmut, Lifanov made a claim that mirrored what Ukrainians had long argued: that the battle served to tie up Ukrainian soldiers and resources in one place for easy pickings. "This was the Stalingrad option — to draw the enemy into the city, tie him up in the street fighting, keep his hands busy, and blind his strategic vision," he said.

It was no such thing to many Ukrainian soldiers, who had long before resigned themselves to losing the city — but shrugged off its tactical significance.

Their fight relieved pressure on the front line elsewhere, they said; Russia had to be held back — and Ukraine did so at a place where its forces could kill extraordinary numbers of Russians before the counteroffensive.

"They achieved the political, big fuss over the Russian media. But tactically I can't see anything," Cmdr. Vitaliy Kryukov, a loitering-munition commander for Ukraine's elite Adam Tactical Group, said.

Kryukov was speaking from outside Bakhmut, from where Ukraine was gearing up with its counteroffensive.

In the meantime, Prigozhin was escalating his feud with the Kremlin's top military brass.

Just one month after declaring victory in Bakhmut, Prigozhin spectacularly upped the ante of his monthslong feud with Shoigu and Gerasimov, staging a rebellion in an apparent attempt to confront the Kremlin.

He died in a suspicious plane crash in August.

More than a lost city

Something breaks inside you when you kill someone, said Husach, the soldier of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade. He was close enough to look into the faces of the Russians there.

Back in Kyiv, he struggles to relate to what he sees, where people who haven't fought amble into cafés and dance in nightclubs.

"They do not get it," he said.

Some people avoid soldiers, Husach says, the all-too-visible reminders of war. "It's like you're not home anymore, and you find peace only on the front line."

None of those who spoke with Business Insider said they'd been prepared for what awaited them in Bakhmut, and the physical and psychological suffering is acute.

Golian, the special-forces sniper, considers himself lucky he didn't lose any limbs. But the war leaves a "deep trace" on the psyche of every Ukrainian who fights, he said.

Since going to war, he no longer dreams. And waking life is somehow less vivid, too.

"The things that used to make me happy no longer cheer me up," he said. "I suffer, like, indifference to them. I stopped feeling in a bright, distinct way, any positive emotions as well as any negative emotions."

In the months since Prigozhin declared victory in Bakhmut, Russia's troops have made little forward progress. The battle was not decisive for either side. Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June. Bakhmut has become one of its three main axes, but despite heavy fighting so far only small bits of territory around Bakhmut have been reclaimed. Another winter may slow what fighting continues.

The city of Bakhmut itself is in ruins.

"Everything is destroyed," a deputy battalion commander who fought there said. "No, they don't take the city. They just destroyed the city."

Jason Corcoran, Alia Shoaib, Erin Snodgrass, and Sophia Ankel contributed reporting to this story.