36 Hours in Bakhmut: One Unit’s Desperate Battle to Hold Back the Russians
A group of 16 draftees lost 11 who were killed or captured. Whether it was worth the cost depends on a widely anticipated offensive.
KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine—Pvt. Oleksiy Malkovskiy, an unemployed father of three, fired a rocket-propelled grenade for the first time in his life on the front lines of the battle for Bakhmut in February.
Russian troops were assaulting one of the apartment blocks that his group of 16 draftees, many of whom had been enlisted days earlier and given no training, had been assigned to defend.
Malkovskiy missed. The Russians fired their own RPG and hit the wall beside him, leaving him concussed. He ran from the building and hid in a vegetable patch, his ears buzzing. When he returned after sundown, the bodies of two of his comrades lay in the room.
Over the 36 hours he spent in brutal house-to-house combat in the eastern Ukrainian city, 11 of the 16 men from Malkovskiy’s group of draftees were either killed or captured, according to surviving soldiers and relatives of the missing.
Russia finally consolidated control over Bakhmut over the weekend, after a 10-month battle that Kyiv used to grind down Russia’s forces. While neither side has disclosed its casualties, many thousands of soldiers on both sides have died on the Bakhmut front, according to Western estimates. Many more have been injured.
In an effort to preserve brigades trained and equipped by the West for a widely anticipated offensive, and with many of its professional soldiers dead, Kyiv sent in mobilized soldiers and territorial defense units, sometimes with patchy training and equipment.
The ultimate success or failure of Ukraine’s strategy in Bakhmut will hinge on the results of the bigger offensive.
“If you can avoid having to divert your decisive combat force toward something like Bakhmut, which would have a long-term negative impact on the overall counteroffensive, then you do it,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Of course you still pay a high price.”
Oleksiy Malkovskiy, a soldier of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, near a base in eastern Ukraine.
A recruitment poster for the National Guard of Ukraine in the country's east.
Vladyslav Yudin, a former convict who served 13 years in prison for multiple offenses, says he was sent to the front line in eastern Ukraine with no training shortly after being mobilized for service in the Ukrainian military.
Yudin scrolls through Russian social-media posts that claim to show dead Ukrainian soldiers.
The 16 men including Malkovskiy, enlisted into the 5th company of Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade, left Kharkiv on Feb. 16 by bus for the brigade’s base 2½ hours’ drive south.
The passengers were mostly poor men from villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region, many of them unemployed, doing odd jobs as handymen or shift work at factories in the regional capital. Many had received mobilization notices that month, according to their military-service records. While some had completed mandatory service years or decades earlier, almost none had seen active combat.
They spent two nights at the base, where they were given Soviet-era rifles and uniforms, according to military documents and photos. On Feb. 18, they were driven to Kostyantynivka, 16 miles from Bakhmut, and billeted in a house on the outskirts of the garrison town.
They posed for photos with their rifles in front of religious icons placed on the mantelpiece of the house, drinking energy drinks on bunks in one of the bedrooms, and smoking and eating in the kitchen.
On the morning of Feb. 21, the company sergeant major arrived to say he had orders to send the men into Bakhmut in groups of six. Russian forces were edging closer to the river that bisects the city, pressuring Ukrainian units defending themselves from constant mortar and artillery bombardment.
Some of the men threatened to write an official refusal to follow the order, citing a lack of training. Vladyslav Yudin, an ex-convict from the eastern city of Luhansk, said he told the sergeant major he had never held a gun, let alone shot one, and was scared. “Bakhmut will teach you,” he said the man replied.
When the first group of men arrived in Bakhmut that evening, they were told to follow a commander to their position. They walked down alleyways past the ruins of bombarded buildings, stepping over downed telephone poles and unexploded Russian shells.
They reached a high-rise apartment block separated by a shed, a chain-link fence and a small garden from Russian troops in the next building. They took up positions beside windows on the first floor. Then they came under fire with grenades and mortars, and Yudin said he saw Serhiy Didik, a 36-year-old villager, and the commander killed in front of him. “It was hell on earth,” he said.
Less than 300 yards away, farmer Serhiy Puhasiy was in a house under heavy Russian attack that forced his group out. He came under machine-gun fire from the third story of another building and watched his squad leader and another soldier fall. He found himself exposed as bullets whizzed around him. He fell to the ground and soon found himself surrounded by Russian soldiers.
Serhiy and Anzhela Puhasiy with their son Vladyslav in their house in the village of Alisivka in the Kharkiv region, after Serhiy's release from Russian captivity.
Serhiy and Anzhela Puhasiy's wedding photos at their family home.
Serhiy Puhasiy's army jacket.
While Serhiy Puhasiy was in a Russian prison, his son Vladyslav made a drawing of himself on a tank saving his father from his captivity.
“Are you alone?” asked one of the Russians, tying his arms while another removed the rifle from his hands and took off his body armor. He said he was.
Since that battle on Feb. 21 and 22, and a subsequent mission on March 2 for which the unit’s surviving members were sent back into Bakhmut, the wives of the missing have been searching for information. They have written to the Red Cross and United Nations, called a Ukrainian government hotline, and posted to dozens of social-media pages for the disappeared.
Puhasiy’s wife, Anzhela, received notice that her husband was missing on Feb. 24, three days after she had last spoken to him. “It’s like standing on a cliff edge. I’m neither a wife, nor a widow,” she said in an interview in early April. “The worst thing is not knowing.”
The couple’s 9-year-old son, Vladyslav, drew a picture of himself standing atop a tank clutching a Ukrainian flag, headed to the front line. “Daddy, I’ll save you,” reads his caption.
In early March, two military officials arrived at the home of Vasiliy Zelinskiy, a 51-year-old steel-factory shift worker with a diagnosed spine ailment, to share news of his disappearance. His wife, Olena, began to sob, asking them, “How can it happen that you took a man away without training and a week later he’s gone?” One man lowered his eyes, she said, and the other answered, “It’s war. No one will train them now.”
On April 2, a channel tied to the Wagner paramilitary group that spearheaded Russia’s assault on Bakhmut posted a photo of Didik’s military ID and said he had been confirmed dead. But Didik’s wife, Valentina, is convinced he is in Russian captivity. “I know my husband is alive,” she said in a message to The Wall Street Journal. “My heart feels it.”
The wives of the missing men are angry that they were sent into Bakhmut without training. The vast majority of mobilized soldiers in Ukraine receive at least minimal preparation, and cases of untrained men being ordered to fight aren’t widespread. But Ukrainian law doesn’t specify how long training should last, and lawyers say recruits can do little beyond lodging a complaint via their commanders or a Defense Ministry hotline.
Ukrainian lawmakers in February introduced a bill mandating a minimum of three months’ preparation for mobilized troops, but it hasn’t advanced through Parliament. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry denied sending soldiers without training into Bakhmut, and an officer from the 93rd said he hadn’t heard of such cases in his unit. “If it happens, it’s wrong,” he said. A spokesman for Ukraine’s armed forces declined to comment.
In mid-April, Puhasiy was released in a prisoner swap after almost two months in Russian captivity. He was held in a prison in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk region before being moved to a cell in an abandoned factory. He and a dozen others were blindfolded, driven to Bakhmut and told to walk across the front line as Russian troops communicated by radio with the Ukrainians, ensuring both sides held their fire.
In the end, Puhasiy believes, it was his very short service in the military that saved him from execution at the hands of his captors. When the Russians looked at his military record card and saw the date he was mobilized, less than a week earlier, they asked how long he had fought. “Twenty-four hours,” he replied. He said they warned that if he is ever captured again, he won’t survive.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com