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Bakhmut setback and Storm Shadow supplies emerge
Summary
On a single day in May 2023, two separate reports touched on the fighting in Donetsk Oblast and on Western military aid to Ukraine.
What did the war look like on 11 May 2023? Two reports from that day, one from the battlefield and one from London, offered a partial answer.
The first came from the Russian side. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, confirmed that Ukrainian troops had recaptured parts of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast from his forces. The admission concerned a city that had become the focus of the eastern front in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Battle of Bakhmut, fought between the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces for control of the city, was regarded by some military analysts as the bloodiest battle since World War II.
The second report was about weapons. The United Kingdom's Defence Ministry confirmed that it had supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow cruise missiles. The confirmation placed the missiles among the military aid that Western governments were sending to Kyiv during the war.
Two threads, one day
The two announcements were not presented as connected, and nothing in the reports linked the recapture of ground in Bakhmut to the delivery of the missiles. Taken together, they show how the war was being described that day: a contested city where Ukrainian forces had regained some positions, and a public acknowledgement from a Western government about the equipment it had provided.
The Bakhmut confirmation was notable for its source. It came from the head of the Wagner Group, whose forces were the ones that had lost ground, rather than from the Ukrainian side alone.
