On March 24, 2023, Ukrainian army are close to Bakhmut. Photo by Aris Messinis for Getty
In the conflict-torn city of Bakhmut, Russian forces used a tank to blow themselves into a structure.
The New York Times stated that Ukrainian troops left the structure before it was detonated to contain them.
This urban combat scene serves as a memorial to the bloody Battle of Stalingrad during World War II.
According to a Ukrainian commander, his fighters detonated their own structure in Bakhmut in order to enclose Russian soldiers who broke in and engaged them in combat from room to room. The incident serves to highlight the intensity of the torturous house-to-house battle for the devastated city.
In a recent interview with Military.com, Col. Pavlo Palisa, the 93rd Mechanized Brigade’s front-line commander, highlighted instances of heavy urban fighting the Times of New York. According to him, Russian soldiers once used a tank to ram through the walls of an apartment complex held by Kiev’s forces.
After the Russians entered the structure, fighting broke out in each individual room, according to Palisa, who also noted that soldiers from both sides were stationed within the apartment building. He said to the Times that while the Russians were still inside the flat, the Ukrainians set off explosives around the building, swiftly fled, and blew it up.
Several times a day, intense close-range firefights take place often, according to Palisa. Other Ukrainian soldiers told the Times that battle has taken place in basements and abandoned houses, and that sometimes they are so close to Russian soldiers that they can hear them talking in surrounding buildings.Drone footage shows the destruction of Bakhmut in Ukraine. ADAM TACTICAL GROUP
The fighting for Bakhmut, a town with a pre-war population of over 73,000 in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, is a horrifying affair that has been going on for months and has claimed thousands of lives. It is the longest and bloodiest battle of the Russian war, regularly drawing comparisons to the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
A case study from the Modern War Institute describes the costly block-by-block battles fought by the Soviet Union and the German army during the five-month Battle of Stalingrad. John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, and Maj. Jayson Geroux, a Canadian Army infantry officer, described the battle as “one of the most intense urban battles in history.”
“Buildings and floors in Stalingrad changed hands dozens of times, and it sometimes took platoons and companies several days and up to 90 and even 100 percent casualties just to capture a building or floor within it,” the duo wrote in their 2021 study “Whole battles were fought around individual buildings or complexes with names like Martenovskii store, Pavlov’s house, grain elevator and commissary’s house.”
