The nearly five-month battle for the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut has lasted so long and caused so much death and destruction that even if Russia wins, it will be a Pyrrhic victory, military experts say.
Scenes of destroyed apartment blocks, seriously injured soldiers, trenches full of mud and citizens hiding in basements under constant bombardment have become commonplace in and around Bahmut since the beginning of the conflict.
Taking control of the city, which before the war had about 70-80.000 inhabitants, and now about 10.000, could serve as a springboard for Russia to progress towards two larger cities, Krematorsk and Slavyansk, writes Reuters.
It would also leave Ukraine without a useful road and rail supply line.
However, heavy fighting since August 1 and Russian shelling since May has left much of Bakhmut in ruins, while Ukrainian forces in the west have had enough time to build defensive lines nearby to fall back on.
"If Bahmut had been conquered when they started the attack in August, that would have been significant. However, everything is in flux," said Konrad Muzika, a Polish military analyst.
He assessed that the strategic value of Bakhmut was reduced by Ukraine's fortification of the surrounding area in the months that followed, making it difficult for Russia to turn the capture of the city, if it happened, into a wider breakthrough.
Nevertheless, that conflict has taken on enormous importance on both sides because it is the main scene of fighting as winter draws in, large resources are deployed and it is the first battle in several months that Russia seems to have a chance of winning, according to the British agency's analysis.
The battle, described by commanders on both sides as a "meat grinder," has been compared by some Russian, Ukrainian and Western experts to World War I, where Germany and Britain suffered heavy losses in trench warfare for often meager territorial gains.
Igor Girkin, a Russian nationalist and former Federal Security Service officer who helped launch the original US-sanctioned war in Donbass in 2014, said this Sunday that he thought his side's strategy in Bakhmut was "idiotic".
"What will happen next (after the potential Russian conquest of Bakhmut)?" Girkin said in a video, adding that the Ukrainians will only retreat to the second defensive line while continuing to build other defensive lines behind it.
"It erodes the enemy's World War I-style defenses," Girkin said, arguing that Moscow must change its battlefield strategy and deploy forces differently.
Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the US institute CNA, says that Moscow seems committed to the fight because of the resources it has already spent, not because of a "reasonable strategy".
"The fight for Bahmut is not pointless, but it is strategically wrong (for Russia) given the weak offensive potential and the absence of prospects for breakthrough even if it captures the city," Kofman said.
The convicts accepted Prigozhin's offer
Neither side discloses the total number of victims in Ukraine. However, Ukraine says Russia is suffering heavy casualties and that many of those killed were convicts recruited by the private Moscow mercenary firm Wagner.
The founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was sanctioned by Washington, confirmed that his men are fighting there.
He offered the convicts to fight and be pardoned in six months or, if they agreed to desert, they would face execution.
In November, the independent Russian portal Meidazon reported that publicly available data from Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service showed that the total number of prisoners fell by 23.000 in September and October, the largest such drop in more than a decade.
Reuters states that this shows that the convicts accepted Prigozhin's victory.
Prigozhin warned that no quick breakthroughs were expected, and on December 12 he declared that Wagner's task in the battle for Bakhmut was to "kill as many enemy soldiers as possible and to exhaust the Ukrainian army."
According to the data of the Russian authorities on the situation on the battlefield, Ukraine is suffering heavy losses in personnel and weapons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that Bakhmut is the "hottest spot" on the 1.300-kilometer front.
He paid a surprise visit to Bahmut yesterday, where he greeted the "superhuman" soldiers and awarded them medals.
Ukraine victim of recent success
Bakhmut, which Russia calls Artyomovsk, as the city was called in Soviet times, has long had political value for that country.
Because it is on the front line that cuts through Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, the capture of Bakhmut would bring Russia closer to full control of Donbas, parts of which have been controlled by Russian proxies since 2014.
After Russian troops left northern Ukraine in a humiliating retreat in April, Moscow publicly reformulated its primary war goal as the "liberation" of Donbass.
Polish analyst Muzika says Bahmut has become a battle of attrition.
"The Ukrainians are just wearing out the Russians and it's quite effective in terms of manpower and equipment," he said. "They increase the cost to the Russians."
British military intelligence assessed that there is a "real possibility that the conquest of Bakhmut has become a primary symbolic, political goal" of Moscow.
Reuters said a victory there would help boost morale, and Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russian forces in Ukraine since Oct. 8, could show he made a good move by redeploying forces elsewhere after withdrawing from the southern city of Kherson.
It would also bolster Prigozhin's political capital in Moscow if he could take some of the credit for such a victory, the analysis says.
Ukraine is counting, experts say, on retaining control of Bahmut to help it maintain support from Western nations whose arms supplies Ukraine's war effort depends on.
Since Ukraine has achieved a series of battlefield successes, even a relatively minor defeat risks creating a perception of stagnation, which could make Western countries less willing to support Kiev amid its own mounting economic problems stemming from the war, Reuters points out.
"At this stage, Ukraine is a victim of its own recent success, and is suffering from heightened expectations of sustained momentum," Kofman said.
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