Comments by "UzuMaki NaRuto" (@UzumakiNaruto_) on "Ukraine. Military Summary And Analysis 2023.03.05" video.

Almost no small town/city the size of Bakhmut is worth fighting most of a year for while losing thousands of troops and countless amounts of equipment in the process. Any half decent army would've figured out a way to take such an objective much quicker and with far fewer casualties. This of course doesn't describe the Russian army.
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@iigalaxyii9928 *Bakhmut is worth the fighting because of several reasons. The city is strategically placed at a high elevation and is a crossroad for the Donbas infrastructure which means if Russia can take it that’ll allow the Russians to more opportunities to develop more offensive.* There's a difference between an objective worth fighting for and an objective that's worth fighting for at all costs. Bakhmut clearly doesn't fall under the latter and it doesn't make sense for either side to fight so hard for it especially on the Russian side. I guess for the Ukrainians if they feel its worth it as a delay tactic and to get Russia to only focus on Bakhmut and the surrounding area with them unable to launch any significant attacks elsewhere along the front then maybe the sacrifice is worth it to them. For the Russians I don't see the cost being worth it if any breakthrough they may achieve cannot be exploited by a large armored force. If they don't have an large armor force to push the opening, then its pointless because you simply push the enemy back to their next line of defense WWI style. Heck if the Russians did have any significant armored force they should've been able to close up the pocket long ago and complete the encirclement and force the Ukrainians to counterattack to try and relieve the trapped Ukrainian forces. Its interesting to see the parallels of Bakhmut to Stalingrad where the strategic significance of the objective pales in comparison to the political and media significance of capturing the city. I mean if you simply zoom out and look at the map of Ukraine, Bakhmut is but a tiny dot where taking it or losing it isn't going to make much of a difference militarily in the outcome of the war compared to the political/media gain.
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@iigalaxyii9928 The Russians were smart enough to flank and encircle it and are now forcing the Ukrainians to retreat who’re getting decimated by artillery as they scramble. Where was the Russian intelligence to surround Bakhmut months and months ago so that they could avoid the thousands of casualties they've taken and the high amounts of equipment losses that are difficult to replace? Seems pretty stupid that they only tried to encircle the city only recently rather than doing it from the start. In the end Bahkmut is gone and unlike Kharkiv and Kherson Ukraine doesn’t have the numerical advantage or the heavy equipment to do another large scale counter offensive. The interesting thing is that Russia hasn't had enough equipment to launch a large scale armored offensive since the Kiev retreat. Have we seen even one big armored offensive since that time? Nope. Not during the summer Donbas campaign and not anytime during the Bakhmut battle where they've only been able to muster up relative small scale armored attacks compared to the long columns of armored vehicles that we saw at the beginning of the war. That's how much heavy equipment that they've lost that is mostly irreplaceable and has caused the Russians to turn to infantry heavy attacks that no modern army would ever do unless they were suffering massive casualties that they couldn't replace.
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