How Bakhmut Became Europe's Deadliest Post-WWII Battle

Even in a war infamous for its casualty rate, the Battle of Bakhmut managed to stand out. Since mid-2022, Russian and Ukrainian forces have been fighting for supremacy in the Donetsk town of Bakhmut — a gateway to the wider Donbas region. Initially, the battle began as just another step in Moscow’s plan to grind across the whole of Donbas using artillery barrages.

A small, necessary clash that would take the Kremlin’s forces swiftly on to the far-more important cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Instead, that small clash wound up becoming the deadliest battle seen in Europe since the end of WWII. With tens of thousands thought to have been killed on both sides, Bakhmut is the site of carnage not seen on the continent since 1945.

The Yugoslav Wars, the Chechen Wars, the Greek Civil War — even the deadliest battles of these bloodbaths were a mere drop in the ocean compared to Bakhmut. And that raises a vital question: how did a small city known for its vineyards become the Ukraine War’s worst kill zone?

Europe’s Post-1945 Peace and the Return of Industrial-Scale War

When the final bell rang on WWII, it echoed across a Europe that had been shattered for the second time in 30 years. Between 1914 and 1945, an incomprehensible number of people had died on the continent. Civilians, soldiers, men, women, children — tens of millions had vanished, swept away by a tsunami of violence.

In the deadliest battles alone — the Battle of the Somme, the Siege of Stalingrad — over a million had died. Perhaps it is no surprise that Europe’s leaders looked at this carnage and swore to themselves “never again.” The remarkable part: they managed to stay pretty true to their word.

While there certainly were wars in Europe post-1945, they were rarely on the scale of the conflagrations that had come before. Even the worst of all — the Bosnian War — couldn’t hold a candle to the infernos of yesteryear. And that was seen as a one-off, a shameful aberration in an era of peace.

But then came the Ukraine War. When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, he wasn’t just ending an age of relative peace, nor was he simply triggering a geopolitical earthquake. He was doing all this while also starting the deadliest war seen in Europe since the Fall of Berlin — a war estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people and wounded hundreds of thousands more.

Nowhere has the scale of bloodshed been more evident than around the Donbas city of Bakhmut. Because reliable death tolls are impossible to come by, there is considerable debate over just how awful Bakhmut’s grinding trench warfare and artillery duels have been. But one only needs to glance at the estimates to know that “awful” is the appropriate word.

In March 2023, for example, the BBC reported on Western estimates of between 20,000 and 30,000 Russian troops killed and wounded around the city. A month later, Reuters spoke with American officials who suggested that Russia, and Wagner mercenaries fighting on Moscow’s side, had suffered tens of thousands killed. On the other side, estimates are similarly vast.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted of killing 11,000 Ukrainian troops in a single month. More realistically, a Russian-installed official claimed between 15,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian deaths around Bakhmut from fall 2022 to spring 2023.

Bakhmut’s Casualty Toll Dwarfs Every European Battle Since 1945

These are vast numbers — not on the scale of the Somme, but far bigger than any single military action undertaken in Europe in the last 78 years. For comparison, the deadliest battle of the Yugoslav Wars, the Siege of Sarajevo, killed less than 15,000 over four years. Still horrific, but not even close to Bakhmut’s appalling toll.

Even within the mayhem of the Ukraine War, the only other battle estimated to have come close is the Siege of Mariupol, which may have ended 25,000 lives. Yet Mariupol fell over a year before fighting continued around Bakhmut. In March 2023, NATO was estimating up to 1,500 casualties a day on the Russian side alone.

Toward the end of April, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby estimated 20,000 Russian deaths across the entire front between December and April 2023, with a full half of those coming from Wagner units in Bakhmut. The civilian toll is impossible to determine. Both Moscow and Kyiv tightly control information coming out of the ruined city, and the fighting is simply too fierce for anyone to do an objective appraisal.

All that can be said is that the pre-war population of 70,000 is thought to have been reduced to between 2,000 and 3,000. While the majority of those will have fled, there is no doubt that civilian bodies lie amongst the ruins. Counting casualties is a huge technical feat.

Ranged weapons like artillery can leave so many buried under rubble that spotting drones cannot make an accurate count. Many of those dying around Bakhmut are prisoners recruited by Wagner — prisoners who are buried in secret and whose deaths are rarely reported to authorities or family members. Ambiguities aside, most analysts agree that Bakhmut’s casualty rate has been enormous.

From Vineyards to Kill Zone: The Death of a City

Sixteen months before the worst of the fighting, Bakhmut was a small, pleasant town where it felt like nothing ever happened. Although situated in the industrial Donbas region — and a historic center for salt and gypsum mining — Bakhmut had little of the grimy industrial architecture one might imagine. Instead, the center was a place of faded 19th-century grandeur, of townhouses, boulevards, and parks.

Parts of the surrounding regions were covered with vineyards, outward evidence of the sparkling wines produced there. Yet for all its surface gentility, Bakhmut had a hidden darkness. Back in 2014, the town had been one of those seized by pro-Russian rebels backed by Moscow.

Bakhmut lies on the E40 highway — the cross-border road that sweeps from Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv right the way to Russia’s Rostov-on-Don. Controlling it would not just open an important roadway to Kharkiv but also to important cities in Donetsk Oblast like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. This may be why Ukraine made retaking it a priority.

After several months, the occupation was ended, and the city returned to Kyiv’s hands. But what made Bakhmut a target in 2014 was still applicable eight years later. When Russian armor swept over the border on February 24, 2022, it was only a matter of time before it arrived on the town’s doorstep.

The battle was never envisaged as a spectacular showpiece of the war. Things really started in June 2022, during the Russian summer campaign in Donbas. A month or so before, Russian units had finally retreated from around Kyiv and northern Ukraine — the first major defeat suffered by the Kremlin.

To compensate, Putin’s generals concentrated all their firepower on the Donbas region, often using huge artillery barrages that, at their height, may have fired tens of thousands of shells a day. Moscow’s forces crawled forward in Luhansk, blasting cities into rubble so Ukraine couldn’t defend them anymore, before claiming victory atop the ruins. In early July, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk fell, giving the Kremlin full control of Luhansk — one of two provinces that make up Donbas.

The Russian army then mostly began an operational pause, exhausted after months of fighting. Only a few units, backed by Wagner mercenaries, pushed on, hoping to take some minor cities in Donetsk during the lull. Most assumed they would quickly succeed.

Instead, they opened a nine-month campaign of attrition. The fighting began in the countryside around Bakhmut in July but reached the city proper in August. That month, airstrikes and shelling cut off the settlement’s electricity, while Wagner mercenaries managed to break through Ukrainian lines and into the eastern outskirts.

By October, the water had been cut off. Regular Russian troops were in the suburbs to the south, creeping inexorably forward. But it was not until November arrived and winter grasped Ukraine in its chill grip that the battle became a meatgrinder.

In trenches around Bakhmut, damp and freezing men were suffering and dying in ways not seen in Europe for decades. Each day brought hundreds of new casualties — most from Wagner’s convict army, but also from elite Russian airborne units and from Ukrainian defenders. In the midst of all this, Vladimir Putin is said by Ukrainian intelligence to have ordered the capture of Donbas by the end of March 2023.

It was at this point that the peaceful wine-making city was transformed into one giant kill zone.

The Strategic Calculus: Why Neither Side Would Walk Away

To properly analyze Bakhmut’s death toll requires understanding the thinking behind it — why both militaries chose to commit so many forces to a zone they knew was a nightmare. Make no mistake: it was a choice. One officials in Kyiv made for different reasons than Putin and his generals, but one that still required an active decision.

From the Ukrainian perspective, it is true that Bakhmut sits on an important highway leading into the Donbas. But it is equally true that the rest of Donbas is filled with other fortified cities Kyiv’s forces could easily retreat to. Just a few kilometers west, Chasiv Yar is both well-defended and on a hilltop, which would give the Ukrainian military an advantage over attacking Russians.

Were Bakhmut to fall, it is unlikely Moscow’s forces would be able to repeat the whole ordeal to also take Chasiv Yar. And even if they did, Ukraine could easily retreat to the even-more heavily-fortified cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Ukraine would gain an advantage from retreating, since the terrain of battle would benefit them in any of these three cities.

Abandoning Bakhmut would not collapse Kyiv’s lines. From the Russian perspective, too, Bakhmut should not be worth the blood spilled. When the assault began in summer 2022, taking it would have allowed the Kremlin to link its forces up with those in Izyum and Lyman, opening a new angle of attack into Donetsk.

But then came September’s Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukrainian forces swept across some 8,000 square kilometers in a matter of days, liberating city after city — cities that included Izyum and Lyman. As analyst Michael Kofman noted: “Having lost Izyum and Lyman, RU has no supporting axis of attack into Donetsk from the north. Hence gaining Bakhmut, in my view, offers opportunities for RU that they’re not positioned to exploit.”

The most obvious explanation would seem to be sunk cost fallacy — because so many have died, neither side can now give up, lest all those deaths turn out to be in vain. There is probably something to this. But it would be incomplete to assume both Kyiv and Moscow are simply pushing on for psychological reasons.

At various points, it has been possible to make out a method to the madness. On the Ukrainian side, that method included some of the most favorable kill ratios in the entire war. From late 2022 till early spring of 2023, the number of Russian attackers dying for each Ukrainian defender killed was spectacularly lopsided.

By NATO estimates, that ratio was as high as five-to-one in Ukraine’s favor. By Kyiv’s estimates, it was a staggering seven-to-one. With the rate of attrition so favoring Ukraine, it made sense to hold onto Bakhmut as a way of grinding down Russia’s manpower.

As late as March 11, the UK’s MOD was briefing that the front line in the town was a “killing zone” for Wagner units. The flipside, though, is that most Wagner units are not of particularly high military value. When talking of thousands of Wagner deaths, what is mostly being discussed is the deaths of thousands of convicts recruited by the group and sent into battle with little training.

While it is militarily useful for Ukraine to eliminate these fighters, it stops being useful when the price is experienced Ukrainian troops being killed, even at a favorable ratio. As Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London Lawrence Freedman put it: “The trade did not look so good when experienced fighters were lost in return for Russian ‘expendables’.” Kyiv’s backers recognized this.

According to classified documents leaked on Discord, Washington was pressuring the Ukrainians to abandon Bakhmut for months. The fact they did not suggests other factors were at play — one of which may have been lingering memories of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. The Russian victory in those two shattered cities in the summer of 2022 was like a pair of mini-Bakhmuts.

In both cases, Kyiv’s forces stayed and fought well beyond the point where most considered it worthwhile. The result: Russia’s army was exhausted once taking them, so exhausted they effectively had to stop advancing, giving Ukraine breathing space to wait for Western weapons deliveries — weapons that then played a key role in the campaign to liberate Kherson. For some of Ukraine’s backers, this is exactly what was playing out in Bakhmut: a delaying fight that pinned Russian forces while Kyiv waited for weapons to arrive and trained its troops to use them.

As Professor of Strategic Studies Phillips Payson O’Brien explained: “The plan has been to use the benefits of being on the defensive to accumulate and train forces for the counteroffensive.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeatedly invoked “Fortress Bakhmut” as an icon of Ukraine’s will to resist. His generals vowed to hold it, even as their own soldiers posted videos from the battle, begging to pull back to Chasiv Yar.

Shoigu, Prigozhin, and the Kremlin Power Struggle Behind the Carnage

When talking about decisions taken by Russian forces around Bakhmut, one must bear in mind that they are far from a single, monolithic body. The goals and methods used by regular Russian troops and Wagner mercenaries could not just diverge but conflict with one another. Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu were openly hostile — Prigozhin called the latter man everything from a “fat cat” to “scum” and even accused him of “high treason.”

Many insiders say this is the way Putin likes things. With his underlings fighting among themselves, there is no space to make a move against the tsar. But what is good for Putin is not necessarily good for those fighting on his orders.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Bakhmut, where some have argued the actual battle is masking a deeper political battle between Shoigu and Prigozhin for influence. Putin is thought to have personally ordered the capture of Donbas by March 2023. That order to Shoigu came after Prigozhin failed on a pledge to deliver Bakhmut by the end of 2022.

Since then, the two men had been rising and falling in Putin’s favor as the tides of battle washed in and out. Prigozhin was the golden boy before Christmas, only to see Shoigu ascend in January. For his part, Shoigu watched his own star fall as the March deadline swept by.

This pressure on the two men translated into a desperate need for a victory they could sell to Putin. The competition may have been even darker than a simple game to see who could impress the boss. There is every chance the two were actively seeking to destroy one another’s armies.

Prigozhin himself hinted at this. Back in February, he darkly intimated that ammunition shortages were intentional. In a March update, the Institute for the Study of War assessed the situation: “The Russian MoD — specifically Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff General Valery Gerasimov — is likely seizing the opportunity to deliberately expend both elite and convict Wagner forces in Bakhmut in an effort to weaken Prigozhin and derail his ambitions for greater influence in the Kremlin.”

In other words, one reason Bakhmut became such a meatgrinder is because Shoigu may have wanted to feed as many Wagnerites in as possible to eliminate a rival’s power base. It is a breathtakingly cynical thought — that the head of the Russian MOD was deliberately facilitating the deaths of tens of thousands of Russians simply to knock Prigozhin down a few pegs. And while Shoigu may have engineered scores of Wagner deaths, Prigozhin was hardly an honorable commander.

On May 14, 2023, the Washington Post published information from the Discord leaks suggesting Prigozhin had contacted Ukrainian high command, offering to reveal secret Russian positions in exchange for Kyiv abandoning Bakhmut — secret positions the Ukrainians could have then shelled, killing hundreds of regular Russian soldiers.

Human Waves, Anti-Retreat Units, and the Mechanics of Mass Death

“They send their troops in like waves,” a Ukrainian soldier told Al Jazeera, referencing the Wagner group. “We cannot stop them every time.” Mobilized men from Russia’s Omsk region detailed their leaders’ thinking: “The commanders say openly: ‘You are only meat for us and nothing else.’”

President Zelenskyy, after visiting the frontline, stated: “The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers. This is what madness looks like.” Wagner’s human wave tactics became infamous.

Because Wagner is a volunteer private force, the Kremlin does not have to answer to the families of those fighting for it. This means Putin was fine with them adopting high-risk, high-casualty approaches. Because Prigozhin was able to recruit 50,000 convicts out of Russian prisons, he was likewise unfussed by large fatalities among his forces.

The result was a style of fighting guaranteed to end in death. First, Wagner convict units are sent forward in doomed assaults that the Ukrainians mow down. In doing so, however, they give up their positions.

This allows a second wave of convict units to approach a little closer, since they now know where the fire will come from. By the time several waves have advanced and been killed, Wagner has a strong idea of exactly what the Ukrainian defenses look like. This allows the elite units to step forward and the artillery to be brought in.

The Ukrainian forces are by now tired, making it easier for Wagner to claim an advance. The mercenary group eeked out slow victories in the city, advancing meter by meter over the corpses of their fellow fighters. These convicts had no choice in joining the human waves.

Ukrainian commanders reported the existence of so-called “anti-retreat units” — soldiers whose sole job is to kill any on their own side who try to flee battle. It is a tactic made notorious by the Red Army during WWII. It has been largely responsible for Wagner’s vast losses around Bakhmut.

Human waves are not the sole reason the fighting has been so deadly. Russia’s ongoing use of dense artillery barrages to annihilate whole landscapes also contributed enormously. In the opening hours of the full-scale invasion, Moscow pledged not to target civilians, and Russian generals boasted that their missiles were only hitting military targets.

That claim — never true — changed the moment Ukraine started fighting back. First in the Siege of Mariupol and later in the Battle of the Donbas, Russia adopted a tactic of approaching a city, leveling it with artillery until not a single building remained standing, then claiming victory over the smoking ruins. The point was that it deprived Ukraine’s troops of places to hide and eliminated the need for grueling urban combat.

The flip side is that it killed any civilians who remained. There are credible reports of whole buildings being leveled just to kill a single sniper.

White Phosphorus, Counterattacks, and the Battle’s Grim Legacy

For Ukraine’s troops, the constant rain of shells has been a nightmare. Unable to keep up with Russian fire rates, Kyiv’s forces have suffered far-higher casualties than would otherwise be the case, especially after Russia captured the high ground around Bakhmut in the spring of 2023. There is also Russia’s alleged use of white phosphorus — a smoke-producing weapon that is legal for camouflaging but also a highly dangerous chemical that burns at 800 degrees Celsius and sticks to skin, resulting in a horrific death.

Although its use against enemy combatants is proscribed, videos emerged in May 2023 of Russian forces blanketing Bakhmut in white phosphorus, engulfing the downtown in a sea of fire. While there is no confirmation of the numbers killed in this attack, it speaks to just how willing the Kremlin’s forces have been to accept mass death — among civilians, among Ukrainians, and among their own men — in the fight for this small Donbas town. After months of being pushed slowly back, Ukrainian forces counterattacked, reclaiming several kilometers of territory.

Whether that presaged a wider breakthrough in the city that would see Russia pushed back and Wagner surrounded, or just another small shift in a battle defined by crawling, marginal gains, remained to be seen. Either way, Bakhmut will go down in European history. A name that will become as synonymous with slaughter as that of the Somme.

For the first time since 1945, two nation-state armies in Europe threw everything they could at one small section of a vast frontline, battling for supremacy with a bloody-mindedness almost beyond imagination. It is entirely possible a large Ukrainian breakthrough there could crater Russian morale. Equally, it is possible that pinning Russia’s forces at Bakhmut will prove to have been the key to Kyiv’s counteroffensive.

But even if it ends in Ukrainian victory, the carnage unleashed there should never be forgotten — the tens of thousands of young lives lost, in a hell beyond comprehension, a hell that now holds the grim title of Europe’s deadliest post-WWII battle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did the Battle of Bakhmut become so deadly?

Several factors converged to make Bakhmut Europe’s deadliest post-WWII battle. Wagner Group deployed human wave tactics using 50,000 recruited convicts, sending waves of soldiers forward to be mown down in order to map Ukrainian defenses before elite units advanced. Russia also relied on dense artillery barrages to level the city, while anti-retreat units killed any of their own soldiers who tried to flee. On the Ukrainian side, Zelenskyy’s insistence on holding “Fortress Bakhmut” committed large numbers of experienced troops to the kill zone.

What was the strategic rationale for both sides fighting over Bakhmut?

From Ukraine’s perspective, Bakhmut’s favorable kill ratios — estimated by NATO at five-to-one and by Kyiv at seven-to-one in Ukraine’s favor — made it a useful grinder of Russian manpower while Kyiv waited for Western weapons deliveries. Ukraine also sought to pin Russian forces and exhaust them, replicating the delaying effect it had achieved at Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Russia needed Bakhmut as a stepping-stone into deeper Donbas territory and as a political victory for Putin’s March 2023 Donbas deadline.

What role did the Prigozhin-Shoigu power struggle play in Bakhmut’s carnage?

The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov were likely deliberately expending both elite and convict Wagner forces at Bakhmut to weaken Yevgeny Prigozhin and derail his bids for greater Kremlin influence. Prigozhin himself hinted that ammunition shortages were intentional. He even allegedly contacted Ukrainian high command, offering to reveal secret Russian positions in exchange for Kyiv abandoning Bakhmut — which would have resulted in Ukrainian shelling of regular Russian soldiers.

How do Bakhmut’s casualties compare to other European battles since 1945?

Western estimates placed Russian casualties around Bakhmut at 20,000 to 30,000 killed and wounded, with Russian-installed officials claiming 15,000 to 20,000 Ukrainian deaths from fall 2022 to spring 2023. By contrast, the deadliest battle of the Yugoslav Wars — the four-year Siege of Sarajevo — killed fewer than 15,000. NATO estimated up to 1,500 Russian casualties per day in March 2023 alone. These figures make Bakhmut by far the largest single military bloodbath in Europe since the end of World War II.

Why did Ukraine’s military question whether holding Bakhmut was worth the cost?

Although kill ratios initially favored Ukraine, Emeritus Professor Lawrence Freedman noted the trade stopped looking favorable once experienced Ukrainian fighters were dying in exchange for low-value Russian convict expendables. Ukrainian soldiers posted videos begging to pull back to the more defensible hilltop position at Chasiv Yar. Washington was reportedly pressuring Kyiv to abandon Bakhmut for months. Even analysts like Michael Kofman noted that after Russia lost Izyum and Lyman, gaining Bakhmut offered opportunities Moscow was not positioned to exploit.

Sources

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