Despair of Vladimir Putin

The city of Bakhmut, now reduced to a jumble of ruins and trenches piled with corpses, has already become the symbol of the war of attrition sought by Vladimir Putin a year after the failure of his first attempt at conquest. .

Although its strategic value is apparently low, both contending parties have given it a high symbolic value.

The troops of the Wagner Group and above all their chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, are looking for a victory with propaganda resonance, in which not only is Russia's ability to favorably resolve any battle demonstrated, but also serves to score a point against the Minister of Defense , Sergei Shoigu, and also demonstrate the superiority of mercenaries over regular troops.

For President Zelensky and the Ukrainian army, this battle is also a symbol of their ability to resist the Russian offensive during three months of increasing escalation.

It is also possible that in the wear and tear of this battle both staffs are seeking the maximum preliminary exhaustion of the opponent, before the great clash of both armies that is expected throughout the spring at various points on the eastern front.

There have been numerous occasions on which Moscow has announced the imminent fall of Bakhmut, later denied by the facts.

Now even British intelligence recognizes the Russian advance, and foresees an upcoming fall of a devastated territory that until recently was a city with more than 70,000 inhabitants.

Putin's war is not a military confrontation between soldiers, but a generalized attack by the army that until now was the second in the world against an entire country, its cities, its nuclear power plants, its water, gas and electricity supply infrastructures, everything what a society needs to make its life.

Hence the rain of hypersonic missiles of enormous destructive power that rained down on Ukraine this past week, killing a dozen citizens and severely damaging supplies.

Despite the various changes in strategy, Putin ends up returning to his most characteristic method, as he has demonstrated in his successive interventions in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria: destruction for destruction's sake and extermination for extermination's sake.

In his head, inhabited by the idea of ​​total war, there are no distinguishable military objectives.

For this purpose, the type of hypersonic missiles, very difficult if not impossible to intercept, used this week in an angry demonstration of their capacity to damage without limits, are very useful.

The use of this type of weapons, initially conceived for the destruction of military objectives, perhaps reveals the scarcity of remote-controlled bombs, probably due to the effect of sanctions on technological components,

but it is also an explicit threat to the extent that it deals with weapons capable of transporting nuclear cargo.

They are in no case a winning sign;

on the contrary, they express despair over a victory that eludes him.