An Old Map of Bakhmut

The War in Ukraine (2014-2023)

This morning, in the hope of learning a little about the long battle that taking place around Bakhmut, I went looking for old railroad maps of the area. Thanks to the remarkable website of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, I found a depiction of the many railway lines that came together in the Industrie-Gebiet von Bachmut.

The first thing I noticed was the large number of spur lines, the second the absence of unavoidable bottlenecks. Taken together, these suggest that Russian logisticians were able to send railcars full of artillery projectiles to a wide variety of places south (and, to a lesser extent, east) of Bachmut, thereby establishing a network of small ammunition dumps.

Map of the “Industrial Territory of Bachmut” (Creative Commons)

Many of the ammunition dumps, moreover, would be so close to the positions occupied by Russian artillery units that the journey from distribution point to battery could take place in the organic vehicles of each battery. (To put things another way, there would have been little need for latter-day analogues of the long columns of eighteen wheelers that played such a big role in Operation Desert Storm.)

Source: Wilhelm Koch and C. Opitz Verkehrs-Atlas von Europa (Leipzig: J.J. Arnd, 1905)