Michael Kofman has been consistently wrong since the start of the war. I wish everyone would stop listening to him and write him off as a hack. Anders Puck does a good job outlining Kofman’s arguments about Bakhmut and then shows why those arguments are not entirely reasonable with the biggest reason being the brave defense of Bakhmut lead to Wagner exiting the war, taking out the most effective Russian force in Ukraine, and illustrating a certain fragility to the Russian reliance on military contractors.