By: Francis Farrell / The Kyiv Independent
Water-logged trenches, shredded tree lines, and an undulating, colorless landscape of mud: The visual experience of the battles outside Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast have proved to transcend centuries.
When Ukrainian machine-gunner Viktor Borinets’ photos of conditions on the first line of defense went viral, the comparisons to the notoriously grim trench warfare of World War I wrote themselves.
“It does remind me of the Battle of Verdun, a brutal war of attrition,” Mick Ryan, an ex-Major-General of the Australian Army and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told the Kyiv Independent. “It was a deliberate German strategy which had nothing to do with territory or anything else except bleeding the French forces dry.”
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