Russia has spent 9 months bleeding troops to try to capture a city with limited strategic value, experts say

• Russia has spent nine months trying to capture Bakhmut in a slow and brutal campaign.
• Experts say the city does not even have that much strategic value.
• But it has huge symbolic weight for both sides, so they keep throwing resources at it.

Russian forces have been fighting for nine months to take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war.

But the city appears to have limited strategic importance to Russia's war effort, with the country seemingly committed to the grinding battle in an effort to gain a symbolic victory after months of losses and stalemates, experts say.