Russia is hurling troops at the tiny Ukrainian town of Bakhmut

places in eastern Europe, Bakhmut bears the scars of history. In the 18th century Cossack rebels seized the town and held it for three years. In 1919 it was contested in the Russian civil war. In 1942 Nazis killed 3,000 Jews in Artyomovsk, as the town was then known. And it slipped briefly into the hands of separatists when Russia fomented a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, before being recaptured. Now the latest struggle for Bakhmut is turning into one of the bloodiest battles of the current war.Ukrainian offensives in in September and last month have put Russia on the defensive along vast front lines. The exception is Bakhmut, along with Avdiivka to the south. Virtually all of Russia’s remaining offensive power—which is not much—has been thrown at the town since August. That was originally because it anchors the southern end of a defensive line shielding the bigger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. But the attacks now seem to be animated more by stubbornness than strategy. Even before the war, the town’s population was not much over 70,000.