Ukraine War: Is the defence of Bakhmut a distraction?

I'm joined now by the former senior military intelligence officer, Philip Ingram. Good to see you again, Philip. Now, of course, Russian forces have made some advances in recent days in Bakhmut, but on the whole, there's been very little movement on the front line in recent weeks and months. Why is that? Yeah, well, exactly. Day 374 of Vladimir Putin's 10-day Special Military Operation. And the Russians, we keep talking about this spring offensive. They're probing the front lines in different places.

Bakhmut will more detail that in a moment, but further north, up around Kramina and in the south, around Donetsk, they're trying to see where their weakness is in the Ukrainian defences. And they're not really finding any. The things that are influencing at the moment, the weather, the ground is softening up. It's difficult for armoured vehicles and armoured formations to manoeuvre on it. The Russians don't seem to have been able to develop an armoured punch, a big bit of combat par, with these reserve forces at the moving round, even though there's some capability there. So we're watching for that closely. And UK Defence Intelligence today said, once again, that they believe the Russians are running out of ammunition and a particular artillery ammunition, which is something they need a lot of.

And something they've been using a lot for sure. And looking more closely at Bakhmut itself, of course, which has been under fierce fighting for months now, how close are we to seeing that fall to Russian control? That's a difficult one. The Russians have been advancing and trying to circle it from the north and are having some small successes there. And they're coming in from the east as well. The Ukrainians have carried out some actions by demolishing a couple of bridges that would suggest they're preparing to pull out. But what the Ukrainians have been doing is effectively fixing the Russians in place in Bakhmut for the last seven and a half months. And that's allowed them to attrit the Russians, seven Russian dead for every one Ukrainian, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, and also fix the Russians' attention in there, not just pouring more troops in.

But that then allows the Ukrainians to potentially prepare for something else, elsewhere. And it also means that whilst they're still holding on to Bakhmut, the Russians can't then get their artillery and everything else forward. And this is the level of destruction that we're seeing in Bakhmut. And then focus that on the next town, or the next village, or the next city. Bakhmut originally 70,000, now between four and four and a half thousand civilians in there, according to the Deputy Mayor. This is standard Russian tactics of destroy the place with artillery and then flood it with unprotected infantry to try and get forward. Ukrainians are responding with their artillery, their armour, and elsewhere, and that's why so many Russians are getting killed.

Now, obviously, we've been hearing repeated calls from Ukraine for more military equipment from the West, from international partners. But you mentioned British intelligence in your latest update. How are we helping them in terms of surveillance? Well, British intelligence is part of a wider international effort. And if you go on to some of the Flightradar apps on a daily basis, you'll see these sorts of things flying and these sorts of patterns coming out. And these are aircraft that are coming in that are intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft that are providing a number of different intelligence outputs. This is a British RC-135, signals intelligence aircraft. And the Americans are a global hawk, but we're also getting aircraft coming in from five or six different nations.

And they're all providing three types of intelligence. Signals intelligence and communications intelligence. They're hoovering everything up that the Russians are saying and then analysing that. Measurement and signature intelligence. They're seeing what's on the ground and they can see armoured vehicles. They can see missiles being launched. They can see convoys that are moving and analyse that.

And then imagery intelligence. And of course, the sorts of samples go from the drones that the Ukrainians have. We saw those pictures there to provide the intelligence picture up to what can be provided from satellites. That is all being analysed and helping give the Ukrainians more targeting materials so they can understand where the key places are to hit within the Russian forces. OK, Philip, for now, thanks very much.

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