As the wait for the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive continues, two strikingly different developments in the war have seized attention. The first is that Russia appears to have all but taken Bakhmut after a long, slow and brutal fight which has reduced another thriving community to rubble, cost a staggering number of lives and consumed huge quantities of ammunition. Each side is thought to have suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the battle for a city that is more important to Moscow symbolically than strategically. Both sides have referred to the combat there as a “meat grinder”.
The second development is the startling raid into Belgorod, a Russian border region – claimed by ethnic Russian, anti-Kremlin partisans, who Kyiv says act independently; Moscow blamed the incursion on “Ukrainian militants”. Unlike previous attacks on an oil depot, munitions store and railway bridge in Belgorod, this does not appear to be about a major strategic target. But it has shifted attention from Russian military success to Russian military humiliation.
