Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Forces Face Mobilized Inmates and Drones

BALAKLIJA, Ukraine — In the dark, cramped rooms of a police station in this newly liberated city in Donbas, eastern Ukraine and near the Black Sea to the south, Ukrainian soldiers stubbornly try to advance without losing control of the territory, facing an enemy whose forces have been reinforced by prisoners , which have become fighters, and Iranian drones.

"Perhaps it seems to some now that after a series of victories we have some peace," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his Sunday evening speech. “But this is not peace. This is preparation for the next sequence.”

Over the weekend, Ukraine's military mounted a push in the country's south, with forces attacking Russian military strongholds and targeting sites used by local officials loyal to the Kremlin. They also continue to hit supply lines for thousands of Russian troops on the west bank of the Dnieper River. Ukrainian strikes in the important Russian-held city of Kherson appeared to shake security there, with gunfire and widespread disorder reported.

But further north and east, in the town of Bakhmut in the Donbass region, advancing Russian forces made their presence known with the sound of artillery fire on Sunday, underscoring a key point where Ukrainian control may be weakening as Russian forces push from the east and southeast in an attempt to cut off the country's supply.

picture

A Ukrainian tank drove through the center of Bakhmut in Donbass last week. Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Bakhmut, a town with a pre-war population of 70,000, is crucial to Russia's goal of capturing the rest of the mineral-rich Donbas region. As Russian forces captured the industrial city of Lysychansk in early July and consolidated their control over Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbass, Bakhmut soon became the focus of Russia's slow advance.

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

There appears to be an endless stream of soldiers attacking Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut, many of them outside of regular Russian ranks, Ukrainian soldiers said.

Soldiers on the front lines around the city have claimed that Russian forces in the area are mainly made up of units from the Wagner Group, a private military company with ties to the Kremlin. Wagner's troops have fought in places like Syria and Libya -- countries with a history of Russian intervention -- and Ukrainian troops say they are deploying Russian prisoners on the front lines.

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

After Russia's humiliating defeat around the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in the spring, President Vladimir V. Putin declared that the conquest of Donbass, an area roughly the size of New Hampshire, would be one of the main goals of the war.

On Tuesday, the first day journalists were allowed access to Balakliya, the bodies of two men were exhumed from a makeshift grave in the town. Investigators said Russian forces shot both dead last week.

Moscow acknowledged the arrest of the educators, but said they were collaborators of Ukraine, not Russian citizens. And in a sign that the Kremlin is bending reality in the region, the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, the top law enforcement agency, ordered its own criminal investigation into the arrests of these teachers, according to the ministry's Telegram channel.

All of this was part of the continuing reverberations of Ukraine's successful counterattack and Russia's swift and humiliating retreat.