Bakhmut, a former Cossack outpost that was a salt mining town at the beginning of the war, became the scene of a clash between the two armies. Pride, defiance and sheer stubbornness quickly gave the city extreme importance.

Here is an adaptation of The New York Times by Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former Marine who has repeatedly reported from Bakhmut and its environs.

Weeks before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the city of Bakhmut in December, a soldier with the nom de guerre "The Bear" looked out of the window of a destroyed sixth-floor apartment facing the eastern part of the city. The author of the material stood quietly beside him. The battle below was fought in muted ferocity. There was nothing to burn, the territory was shelled to the ground.

"Bakhmut," the author wrote in his diary, "is in a terrible state."

Smoke rises over buildings in Bakhmut, the site of the fiercest fighting with Russian troops in the Donetsk region, April 26, 2023 AP Photo/Libkos

It was one of hundreds of long nights when Bakhmut became the focus of some of the fiercest fighting of the war, the object of Russia's urgency and persistent defense of Ukraine. And now the city of Bakhmut seems to have fallen into Russian hands 10 months later, leaving thousands of soldiers wounded or killed, and the question remains: how did a nondescript city the world has never heard of become a place where both sides decided to fight to the end, regardless of the cost?

"It seems like all the vultures are here," one soldier told the author when crowds of journalists showed up when the city seemed to be on the verge of falling in March.

The trajectory of the war is unknown. Combatants, political attitudes and military strategy alike have a say in the battles fought and the violence that follows. Bakhmut, a former Cossack outpost that was a salt mining town at the beginning of the war, became the scene of a clash between the two armies. Pride, defiance and sheer stubbornness quickly gave the city extreme importance.

Ukrainian troops fire from a self-propelled howitzer at Russian positions near Bakhmut March 7, 2023, AP Photo/Libkos

The city of Fallujah in Iraq was unknown to much of the world until the United States attempted to quell a growing insurgency in 2004. There were two separate battles for the city, one lasting three weeks, the other six. They were intense, but much smaller in scale than the destruction and loss of Bakhmut.

Gettysburg was a typical southern Pennsylvania mountainous landscape with hills and fields, but it was there that three days of futile fighting dashed Robert E. Lee's prospects of turning the Civil War in his favor. Iwo Jima was nothing more than a fraction of an island in the Pacific, but the United States needed it for long-range bombers, and the struggle for control of it was one of the most grueling battles of World War II.

But whether it be Bakhmut, Iwo Jima or Fallujah, the end of the battle, regardless of the stakes or the winner, is always the same: an incomprehensible loss and the expectation of what will happen next.

"The enemy," Joseph Heller's character Josarian said in his World War II novel "Catch-22," "is anyone who's going to kill you, no matter which side they're on."

By Monday morning, May 22, Ukrainian officials were talking about controlling the "outskirts" of Bakhmut and preparing operations on the flanks, which had little indication that the battle in the city had come to an end. Among the ruins, the prewar population dropped from about 70,000 to a few thousand or less.

Russia's capture of Bakhmut at one point seemed unlikely. The Ukrainian army pushed the Russians out from under Kharkiv last September. In November, the port city of Kherson was liberated. Ukraine won. Among some in Bakhmut was hope that Kyiv's troops would continue their offensive, turning the tide once and for all.

But despite defeats elsewhere, Moscow's troops, along with Wagner mercenary forces, the Kremlin-backed group that led the assault on Bakhmut, never stopped attacking the city.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that his troops intend to capture Bakhmut and then target the entire mineral-rich Donbas region in which the city is located. There was no winter lull, the ground hardened, and it became painful to touch the metal breaches of howitzers and Kalashnikov assault rifles with fingers numb from the cold. Spring simply brought even more destruction in fierce and bloody street fighting.

Ukrainian troops in a trench under Russian fire on the front line near Bakhmut, March 5, 2023, AP Photo/Libkos

Military analysts, Western officials and media have argued for months about Bakhmut's "strategic importance." The Russians could make better use of their resources, analysts say. Ukraine must retreat to better ground and continue its offensive elsewhere, they added.

The author mentions experts and the press in 2010, when he fought in another battle as a marine in southern Afghanistan - the battle for Marja. It was nowhere near the violence he witnessed during his many trips to Bakhmut as a journalist for The New York Times, but like Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their city, he knew the world was watching.

How little this meant in 2010, when no public scrutiny could determine if his friends were alive or dead. And how little it meant to the soldiers fighting in Bakhmut, where every minute without shelling or attack was a welcome respite and the goal of every day was to survive and keep each other alive.

Volodymyr Zelensky turned Bakhmut into an official center of war when he visited the city in December, showing up with his war-weary soldiers at a site that looked like an empty factory near the front. The focus was on speed bumps in a town formerly called Artemivsk.

Bakhmut, with its once neat footpaths and famous winery, suddenly became strategically important, generals and analysts agreed or not.

Zelenskyy's visit was necessary for the media and the Ukrainian people. "Bakhmut holds on" became a slogan. Another standard battle took place in the war that was eerily similar to the siege of Mariupol and the fighting in Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk months before: the defenders fought off a much larger army.

Ukrainian soldiers ride a Humvee in Bakhmut December 21, 2022 AP Photo/Libkos

We are "in complete fire surroundings," said one soldier who fought in Bakhmut near the end of the battle, before asking if The Times would provide proper information to the public if he was abandoned.

Once Yevgeny Prigozhin began filming on the Bakhmut front. In a video posted in March, the Wagner leader asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to continue sending "combat-ready units" so his troops could kill them.

He also quarreled with the Russian military leadership, criticizing them and mocking them, giving the Bakhmut narrative greater importance.

Published videos from the battlefield show a landscape wounded by shells with broken trees. Soldiers fought knee-deep from muddy trenches in the water.

Bakhmut was soon compared to Verdun in 1916 (a 10-month battle in which hundreds of thousands of French and Germans died). But bloody trench warfare in eastern Ukraine was nothing new, as it has been a major part of the conflict since Russian-backed separatists began fighting the government there in 2014.

Historical comparisons, however accurate, have not blunted horrors on earth. For months, the dead and wounded from Ukraine flocked to a lonely hospital in Bakhmut. Bloodied stretchers welcomed new patients. Russian corpses littered the surrounding fields, camouflaged they pointed in the direction of their attack.

Zelensky's visit made it clear that his forces will fight to the end. Bakhmut joined the list of cities where many soldiers died in exchange for only a few kilometers of devastated land.

Those soldiers who survive will think for the rest of their lives whether it is worth it. And those who died will be remembered as fallen heroes of the battle for Bakhmut, ranks who met their land in a city that many had not heard of a year ago.

Tetiana Gureeva, mother of Vladimir Gureyev, a Ukrainian soldier killed in the Bakhmut area, cries during a funeral in Boryspil on March 4, 2023, AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda

As the author stood by the broken window on that cold December night, he thought that despite the roar of artillery and cannons, the battle for Bakhmut seemed distant. Two days later, a shell crashed into that empty apartment.

Now the city is patrolled by Russians. The war continues. It will gradually move to new places on the map, not yet destroyed by months of artillery battles, where new slogans may appear and where "strategic importance" remains in question as the world awaits another bloody finale.

As a reminder, limited fighting continues in Bakhmut, Donetsk region and its environs. To the north and south of the city, Ukrainian armed forces are fighting to capture heights, and in Bakhmut itself, they are holding a fortified area.

Over the past day, Ukrainian fighters were able to advance at a distance of 200 to 400 meters.

Read also:

  • Summer is on the way: why the spring counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has not yet begun — AP
  • Will Prigozhin finally withdraw his mercenaries from Bakhmut: forecast of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine told what problems the occupiers face in the Bakhmut direction