Why the battle for the small city of Bakhmut is so important to both Russia and Ukraine

The quagmire of carnage now consuming the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has been mostly overlooked, given Ukraine's battlefield successes against Russia's army elsewhere.

But the gruelling, gruesome six-month fight for the city in the Donbas region may soon reach its culmination, and the outcome is taking on outsized importance for both sides.

"It reminds me of a situation in the First World War," said retired Ukrainian colonel Serhiy Grabskiy, now a military analyst based in the capital, Kyiv.

Fields and villages surrounding Bakhmut are pockmarked with foxholes, filled with shivering soldiers. Troops from both sides shoot at each other over the top of mucky, water-filled trenches that snake for dozens of kilometres throughout the torn-up countryside.

Before Russia's invasion, Bakhmut had a population of 70,000 people and was known mostly for its large salt mine and as a transportation hub where several highways intersected.     

But since the spring, the city has become part of Ukraine's front-line defence.

Facing off against the Ukrainians are some of Russia's better-equipped soldiers, many of them paid mercenaries from the Wagner Group, which is controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Fighting alongside the Wagner forces are conscripted prisoners, forcibly drafted into the fighting ranks, along with perhaps tens of thousands of newly mobilized Russian recruits.

WATCH | Ukraine and Russia engaged in brutal battle for Bakhmut:

Together, they have relentlessly pounded Bakhmut as they attempt to take control of the key roads leading north and west.

Grabskiy says most of the Russian troops are being sacrificed in high-risk attacks to discover the locations of the strongest Ukrainian defensive lines.

"The Russians are sending in wave after wave against [fortified] Ukrainian positions," he said. 

Once the Ukrainians return fire, their positions are then targeted and hit by Russian mortars and artillery. The result has been a bloodbath.

"We have to accept that losses from both sides of the conflict are huge."