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Hello and welcome to the Friday episode of the Battleground Ukraine podcast with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we consider the logic of Ukraine's decision to continue fighting for the city of Bakhmud,

and what the latest Russian missile assault on civilian power infrastructure tells us about Putin's moral and strategic bankruptcy. We're also going to discuss reports

that elements of the Russian armed forces, including the elite spetsnats, special forces,

are suffering high desertion rates, and in some instances are mutineing in the face of certain death.

And in part two, as usual, we'll be answering another bulging postbag of listeners' questions.

But first, we consider Ukraine's decision to fight on in Bakhmud.

On the podcast last week, we reported that President Zelensky had told his senior commanders

that the costly

defense of the city in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, must go on. It's a decision that even some

respected Ukrainian journalists, notably Ilya Ponomarenko of the Kiev Independent, who has more

than 1.2 million followers on Twitter, have questioned. On the 11th of March,

Pona Marenko tweeted, I hope the Ukrainian command really, really, really knows what it's

doing in Bacmout, question mark. Well, it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask,

isn't it? I mean, only this week Russian Wagner mercenaries stormeded sprawling metalworks on the northern edge of

Bachmut that the Ukrainian forces had hoped to hold as an impregnable bastion. There was a video

posted online of a guy claiming to be a Ukrainian soldier. And he described the fight with the

Wagner troops in the compound of the azon metalworks as worse than Stalingrad.

...