‘Like Verdun’: bloody fight for Ukraine’s Bakhmut compared to infamous WWI battle
- The heavily contested city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine is the site of some of the bloodiest battles
- Battlefields carved with trenches and scarred by shells draw comparisons to infamous battles of WWI
An ambulance screams toward a triage hub for wounded Ukrainian soldiers outside Bakhmut, the stage for the longest battle of Russia’s invasion, where there is no end in sight to a brutal stalemate.
Men with limbs lost to mines and artillery wounds are pulled from battlefields carved with trenches and scarred by shells in a fight drawing comparisons to infamous battles of World War I.
“It’s like Verdun out there,” said Ivan, an ambulance driver waiting on a roadside outside the battered industrial city in the eastern Donetsk region.
Like the 1916 fight on the western front in France, the battle for Bakhmut, now in its seventh month, has been long, bloody and futile.
Victory over the city, pounded to ruin, would be merely symbolic as the anniversary of the invasion looms on February 24.
Yet even as the dead and wounded are rushed out or abandoned on the battlefield, both sides are digging in and flinging more troops at Bakhmut to break the deadlock.