As in the famous film “High Noon,” the clock is now ticking toward a showdown — between the Will Kane-like Ukrainian defenders of a now-desolate town, Bakhmut, and an invading group of ragtag Russian lawbreakers. 

Instead of high noon, this showdown is scheduled for May 9. An important date in the Russian calendar, May 9 is the anniversary of the Red Army victory over the Nazis in World War II. Normally marked with joyous parades across the country, President Putin has vowed to dedicate this year’s Victory Day to a final victory in the eight-month battle to capture Bakhmut. Some 4,000 residents are all that’s left of that eastern Ukrainian town’s pre-war population of 71,000.  

According to various press reports, Mr. Putin is planning to declare victory at Bakhmut on Russia’s Victory Day, and then call for negotiations to end the war he launched against Ukraine more than a year ago. Yet, what if the Ukrainian army as of May 9 manages to hold on to parts of the town, where according to Washington some 20,000 Russians have been killed since December? 

“If they don’t manage to take Bakhmut by the ninth of May, it’d be really bad for Putin. The clock is ticking for him,” a professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania, Fred Hoffman, tells the Sun. 

Bakhmut was once considered strategically negligible and too difficult to defend. Yet, a Russian victory there has proved to be elusive. Moscow dispatched tens of thousands of convicts and other undesirables there, promising that by joining the paramilitary Wagner group they’d receive post-battle pardons. 

Yet, “Russia’s attempt at a winter offensive in the Donbas largely through Bakhmut, has failed,” the National Security Agency’s spokesman, John Kirby, said Monday. “Based on intelligence information,” he added, Russia has suffered more than 100,000 casualties since December at Bakhmut — 80,000 wounded and 20,000 killed. 

These numbers were jeered at by the Kremlin as picked “out of thin air.” The Wagner group’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his group had lost only 94 people. Yet, even he acknowledged that holding on to whatever gains Russia has made at Bakhmut may not be easy. 

Specifically, Mr. Prigozhin is saying that for his forces at Bakhmut, “ammunition is no longer left for weeks, but for days.” In a letter to the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, Mr. Prigozhin warns that unless he gets more bullets, his men “will be forced to withdraw from this territory, and then everything else will collapse.” 

Mr. Prigozhin “is stepping up the drama,” a writer for the Kyiv Post, Jason Smart, tells the Sun. Battles between Messrs. Prigozhin and Shoigu are “part of the infighting that we’ve seen among elites” in Moscow since the start of the Ukraine war. Yet, he adds, the Wagner group’s woes are real. 

Seeking to improve his Kremlin credentials, Mr. Prigozhin was hoping to claim a Bakhmut victory for himself. He sent his ragtag group of convicts as cannon fodder to battle the Ukrainian forces there. While the Ukrainians use modern, NATO-supplied weapons, Mr. Smart says the Russian fighters are equipped with old Soviet arms. A loss at Bakhmut, he adds, might even spell the end of Wagner. 

At the same time, while the Russians casualties as estimated by Washington are far higher than the Ukrainian losses, such numbers may not paint the entire picture.

Mr. Smart says a friend of his, a Ukrainian journalist with a Ph.D., was recently killed while serving as a soldier at the front. “Ukraine is using its best and brightest to fight the war, while Russia throws in AIDS-stricken criminals and saves the cost of feeding them in the prisons,” he says.    

The question of defending Bakhmut was debated intensely last winter. Outsiders, and some Ukrainian generals, have advised against losing blood and treasure at a city with little strategic value. Yet, President Zelensky insisted on making a stand. 

“It’s difficult to tell whether the battle is a good or bad idea for Ukraine,” a Russia watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, John Hardie, tells the Sun. “There’s a strong argument to be made that Ukraine should have withdrawn from there in early 2023.” He says Mr. Zelensky decided that his goal is not to give up on any piece of the country’s territory. 

Meanwhile, “the longer that Ukraine can hold on to Bakhmut, the more the Russians get a black eye,” Mr. Hoffman, a former Army intelligence officer, says. The battle there, he adds, “is a classic military feint.” The Russians are being forced to send units to Bakhmut from the south, allowing Ukraine to prepare a long-awaited spring offensive, which could include an attempt to retake Crimea, which Russia invaded in 2014.

As doubts grow over Mr. Putin’s self-imposed deadline for victory at Bakhmut, the entire war is in flux, posing a dilemma for the Kremlin. “A wise man would cash his chips in, but Putin bet the farm on the war,” Mr. Hoffman says.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Kane is watching the clocks, hoping that Frank Miller will be dead and the invaders out of town before the showdown at noon.