Ukrainian tanks entering Urozhaine hit by Russian artillery
As Ukraine advances in western tanks down the centre of the 600-mile front line, Russian military bloggers have been preoccupied with diagnosing their recent losses.
A prominent Russian commentator claimed last week that Russian forces supporting those in Urozhaine, an eastern Ukrainian village that has become a flashpoint of fighting, were too “busy drinking alcohol in the rear” to be of any help. This created fury among the online community.
Many suggested this particular critic was “attempting to inflate the reputation of other defending units” by being critical of those in support, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank.
Some blamed the Kremlin’s dismissal of Major General Ivan Popov, a senior figure in the Russian military command who was dismissed in early July for claiming his men were not receiving sufficient weaponry, as the real reason for recent difficulties.
Others complained that Russia had wasted resources during its fruitless spring offensive and was now being forced to “go into a deaf echeloned defence, temporarily giving the initiative into the hands of the enemy”.
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Whatever the reason – it is perhaps a mixture of all of the above, as well as other issues – Ukraine took advantage. In the past fortnight, the occupation of Urozhaine has been undone, and roughly 60 miles west along the front line, another village, Robotoyne, is primed for liberation.
Geolocated footage published on Sunday (August 13) showed Ukrainian tanks of the 35th Mechanized Brigade rolling into Urozhaine for the first time in more than a year.
Though only a small settlement – its pre-war population was only 1,000 – its recapture constitutes the next vertebrae along a spinal advance towards the Russian-occupied coastal city of Mariupol.
The battles for the village have been compared to the World War II Battle of Kursk, the largest known tank battle in military history, and though it may be premature to celebrate its liberation, footage has shown Russian forces retreating to the southern parts of the area as Ukraine continues to march from the north.
To the west, in neighbouring Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade is using US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to surround the village of Robotyne to the north and east.
These two attacks, in the direction of the Melitopol-Mariupol Russian line running parallel to the Sea of Azov, represent Ukraine’s attempts to sever the land bridge between occupied Crimea and Vladimir Putin’s forces fighting along the eastern front line.
The village of Robotyne is just 50 miles north of Melitopol, while Urozhaine is around 75 miles north of Mariupol.
It has been long expected that such a focus in their counter offensive would take place but now the signs are showing that these two attacks are emerging as the “primary axes” of Ukraine’s operations.
Steven Horrell, a former US intelligence director based in Europe who is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told Express.co.uk there are two further options for Ukraine if they can “exploit” these two advances and break through Russia’s main defensive lines.
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He said that the heavily-armed Western-trained brigades that are still waiting in the reserves for Ukraine will be rolled out to potentially “go north to Luhansk” or “turn southwesterly and really look at the Crimean peninsula”. Those options, he added, are not mutually exclusive.
In the north, Russia is staging its only offensive operation. They are attempting to march on the Ukrainian city of Kupyansk, which last Thursday (August 10) was evacuated.
Towards Crimea, small groups of Ukrainian soldiers allegedly hold positions in the Kozachi Laheri settlement on the southern banks of the Dnipro River, according to Mikhail Zvinchuk, a Russian military blogger who operates under the name Rybar.
These two attacks, from Russia in the north and Ukraine in the south, amount to secondary efforts to draw off one another’s forces from other flashpoints on the front line.
“There’s a kind of a symmetry here between what the Ukrainians are doing in Kherson — trying to give the Russians something else to worry about further west — and what the Russians are trying to do in Kupyansk — trying to give the Ukrainians something to worry about in the north,” said Michael Clarke, a military expert.
Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th Brigade advance near Robotyne
The besieged city of Bakhmut, made notorious by the mercenary group Wagner razing it to the ground and sacrificing more than 20,000 lives to encircle it, is the anomalous fifth and final flashpoint of the front line.
It was Russia’s only significant territorial gain in more than a year when it was finally captured in May and its importance was far more symbolic than strategic; Putin needed to be able to reasonably claim some victory to reassure his people that the “special military operation” was succeeding.
This symbolic value over strategic importance remains. If Ukraine were to recapture it, they would still be hard-pressed to catapult themselves further eastwards “because they would again face those entrenched Russian defensive lines”, Mr Horrell said.
Nonetheless, “the destruction and neutralisation of a somewhat significant Russian outfit on the ground there” is certainly a “tactically strategic achievement”, Mr Horrell added.
Russian specialist VDV forces, such as the 83rd Airborne (VDV) Brigade, are in Bakhmut, known to be among the best of Putin’s fighters. To immobilise them would be valuable.
The Ukrainian counter offensive has been “slow and steady” – even President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted it had been moving a touch sluggish – but it is still progressing.
Russian defensive lines, sometimes tens of miles deep, have proved difficult to penetrate and Ukraine was forced to switch tactics halfway through their counter attack to accommodate this issue.
These changes have clearly had an effect, as can be seen in Urozhaine and around Robotyne.
As these primary lines of attack towards the Sea of Azov become more evident, and the Western-trained brigades join the attack, Ukraine’s territorial advance may quicken.
Perhaps the squabbling Russian military bloggers will have diagnosed the main issues facing their forces by the time this Ukrainian pace-change occurs.
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