“The idea of the Ukrainians is not just to kill as many Russians as possible, but to fix their troops there so they cannot deploy them anywhere else,” said Rajan Menon, a director at the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, adding that Ukraine was well aware of its position in Bakhmut and was taking a calculated risk.
“The question is if you can hold the line and inflict damage with a cost that the commanders in Ukraine deem as acceptable,” Menon said, “is it necessarily a disastrous thing to do?”
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