Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Forces Face Mobilized Inmates and Drones

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Original Article: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Forces Face Mobilized Inmates and Drones

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Ukraine has been pushing a counteroffensive in the east and south, applying greater pressure to Russian forces, but there is no indication of any mass Russian withdrawal.

Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Sept. 18, 2022

BAKHMUT, Ukraine — In battlefields in the rolling hills of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, and near the Black Sea in the south, Ukrainian troops have stubbornly tried to inch forward without losing control of territory, facing an opponent whose forces have been bolstered by inmates-turned-fighters and by Iranian drones.

“Perhaps it seems to someone now that after a series of victories we have a certain lull,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address Sunday. “But this is not a lull. This is preparation for the next sequence.”

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s Army built up the pressure in the country’s south, with forces striking Russian military strongholds and targeting sites used by local officials loyal to the Kremlin. They are also continuing to hit the supply lines for thousands of Russian soldiers on the western bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine’s strikes in the important Russian-held city of Kherson seemed to rattle security there, with firefights and broad disorder reported.

But farther north and to the east, in the city of Bakhmut in the Donbas region, advancing Russian forces made their presence known as the sound of artillery rang out on Sunday, highlighting an important location where Ukrainian control may become tenuous as Russian forces press from the east and southeast in an attempt to cut off the country’s supplies.

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Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Bakhmut, a city with a prewar population of 70,000, is critical to Russia’s objective of taking the rest of the mineral-rich Donbas region. When Russian forces captured the industrial city of Lysychansk in early July and cemented their control of Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbas, Bakhmut soon became the focus of Russia’s slow advance.

Even after Russia took a crippling defeat in Ukraine’s northeast last week, where its troops lost dozens of villages and roughly 1,000 square miles of territory around the city of Kharkiv, its forces still continued to attack Bakhmut.

There seems an unending supply of soldiers around Bakhmut attacking Ukrainian forces, many of them not among the regular Russian ranks, Ukrainian troops said.

Soldiers on the front line around the city have claimed that Russian forces in the area are mainly composed of troops from the Wagner Group, a private military company with ties to the Kremlin. Wagner troops have fought in places such as Syria and Libya — countries with a history of Russian intervention — and Ukrainian soldiers say they are deploying Russian prisoners onto the front lines.

On Tuesday, a video posted online and analyzed by The New York Times showed the Wagner Group promising convicts that they would be released from prison in return for a six-month combat tour in Ukraine. It is unclear when the video was fil...

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