Not to say that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is going perfectly and not referring to you personally, but all the talks about the population of lost or liberated towns has always been a fallacious argument in what is, to all intents and purposes, a war of attrition and in which it is, if anything, the defensive lines, the topography and the extent of the new operational depth associated with the conquest of a given territory the things that actually matter. Saying that the liberation of a village doesn’t count because it had a few hundred inhabitants before 2022, or on the flip side that the capture of Bakhmut didn’t count because it was only 58th on the list of the most populated cities in Ukraine, or that Soledar didn’t matter because it had the same inhabitants as a [insert] remote town in Wisconsin is usually a phenomenon that I blame on either putting politics before military affairs or copium.
Is it sure it was in Bakhmut? The 38th Brigade has been reported around Velyka Novosilka, which is still Donetsk Oblast, although close to the border with Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
It seems strange, if something happened it could have happened between yesterday and today, and such a breakthrough seems quite serious. DeepState surely has its sources, so I believe that. Although the Ukrainians could prepare a line between Pershotravneve and Cherneshchyna if needed.
Still, yesterday’s rumors of a breakthrough in that area had not been confirmed, and Suriyak (a maps maker sympathetic to Russia), who had written about a breakthrough in that area a couple of days ago and recorded a small advance in the map, in yesterday’s update had removed any Russian advance from Raihorodka. Even Serhiivka was not reported as controlled by Russia.
Yes, but on the other hand he’s often quoted as a reliable source by the clique of the famous pro-Russian pages on Twitter.
Great comment. By the way, just now I was reading that according to the Ukrainians the Russian 291st Motorized Regiment in Robotyne is gradually losing combat capability due to losses; at the same time the Russians might be tempted to send elements of the 35th Army, which at the moment is garrisoning the fairly quiet areas around Polohy, in the hotter sectors of the South.
No rational person expects the Russians to collapse at this stage, but the pressure is definitely being felt.
Theoretically, the inexperienced brigades in that area are the 32nd, whose sector should start from Dzherelne and then northwards, and the 21st, which should be between Nevske and Makiivka for what we know. It’s possible, however, that some kilometers on the border of the areas of responsibility are manned by TDF elements.
I find it very likely that the Russian advance is due to rotation problems, but I assume internal to the 66th Brigade. There has been high-intensity fighting in this area for over a month now, and Russia is employing numerous units - for example, all the maneuver regiments of the 4th Tank Division. The new brigades in that sector were introduced to increase force density, not to replace veteran ones. Although personally the “new brigade = zero experience”, “existing brigade = always better” scheme seems a bit fallacious to me, like when the trend was “NATO-trained brigade = invincible”. It always depends from case to case. On the quality of the officers, the training of the troops, the availability of equipment, enemy forces, luck. Some new brigades are formed by a veteran battalion for example.
When UAF does an inter-brigade rotation, it’s because the combat capability of a brigade has already been seriously compromised. Always - otherwise they don’t do it. Brigades then do rotations between their own battalions at their operational level and between companies or smaller units at the tactical level.
Soledar was, unfortunately, a fuck up by the 128th Brigade. In early December all of the brigades that had taken part in the Kherson campaign were rushed to the Bakhmut sector, to relieve brigades that had been in the area for some time (such as the 93rd, before it was sent back to Bakhmut two months later) but mainly to increase force density as Bakhmut had become for both sides the most important sector. The 128th, definitely a veteran brigade, suffered heavy losses in Kherson, replenished their ranks with poorly trained men from TDF, and was sent to Soledar in the very month when Russian efforts were concentrated (rightly so, from their pov) toward that town even more than Bakhmut itself. It really suffered a lot of casualties but I have also read Ukrainians reporting that there were instances of lack of discipline in some companies that some officers after the war will have to answer for. The breakthrough of the lines around the Knauf Gips factory got the whole area into trouble, with Wagner managing to take the heights north of Soledar and the Ukrainians having to send in the then-new 46th Brigade to try to salvage what could be saved in a week or so of extremely hard urban clashes in the town center. This brigade fought well and inflicted a lot of casualties on the enemy, but it could not stop the Russian onslaught that by then had gained favorable ground and suffered very heavy losses. The Ukrainians (too) have this vice of replenishing losses in brigades by using poorly trained personnel, and often this problem affects a part of the “old” brigades (the less famed ones) rather than the new brigades. I wrote “vice”, in reality they often had no choice, but sometimes this made them pay the price harshly. Both in terms of loss of territory and men.
That is, even if they do stabilize the front, they may have to commit more reserves than they would like to.
Ukraine made that call in late May and throughout June already. The whole sector from Kupyansk to Kreminna has probably seen more than double or nearly so the number of Ukrainians deployed.
It’s an identity at the end. More Russians deployed in a given area = more Ukrainians. The alternative was to abandon any position on the eastern bank of the Oskil, but the Ukrainians will never do that if we judge by the history of this war.
However, from the Ukrainian reports I read this morning, in the northern limit of the affected sector the Russians still don’t control the western part of Novoselivske. Their control of Nadiya is confirmed but counterattacks in the area were reported - they would have caused the Russians to retreat by 1 km. No “systemic” difficulty in holding out in that sector is reported and the tone is still optimistic at the moment.
Premise: I know little about this subject, nothing compared to Kofman and Lee. But based on what I can observe, I tend to agree with Grau (I didn’t know him).
The Russians throughout the South are giving stubborn resistance across the contact line. In some places with quite a lot of success, in others with little, but still they are doing what is possible to them and as far ahead as they can. If they retreat it’s because they are being forced to do so by the Ukrainians or because a position behind them is tactically more defensible (e.g., something we might see soon in Novodonetske). The whole “lol you haven’t even reached the actual first line” debate doesn’t make that much sense. The most developed static defense lines have indeed yet to be reached, but Russia is doing what it can to prevent the Ukrainians from reaching them. Okay, on the one hand fighting as far ahead as possible is safer for the hold of the front, but the Russians also have heavy losses, and we know about their situation when it comes to reserves. Right now they would not have enough units to defend the rear lines if by absurd the Ukrainians were to break through. I understand that having multiple undermanned lines to be filled when it’s deemed convenient to is one of the pillars of maneuver defense, but I still see too many theoretical differences.
As the image in the PDF you linked to shows, a maneuver defense would require a space of 50 kilometers, in the Eastern Front of WW2 a Soviet Front (I mean the Army Group) had defenses that extended to a depth of 150 km… If we take into account that from Robotyne to Melitopol there are about 70 km, we can see that particularly in the South I don’t see the physical space for such a defense. In my opinion these are theories developed looking at the events in the Eastern Front of WW2 when there were days in which the Germans or Soviets advanced dozens of kilometers. In this war even in Kharkiv in September there were no such advances. The only exception being the first week of the war. Theories later refined for an hypothetical WW3, which would, however, have seen far more resources and manpower than this war as well as much broader and deeper strategic objectives.
In Robotyne of course both sides often attack and counterattack. As also between Rivnopil and Pryyutne. It’s known that the Russians use mobilized and BARS to hold the lines, then they counterattack with regulars, naval infantrymen, even detachments of Spetsnaz GRU… The Ukrainians advance 2 km, the Russians push them back 1,5 km, the next day the Ukrainians recover 1 km, and so on. In this sense yes, the defenses are more mobile than one might think at first notice - there is no single mega trench that the Russians defend to the death against hordes of bayonet-charging Ukrainians. But actually such stuff was already common in non-mechanized contexts such as WW1, let alone now.
Let’s also say that one of the purposes of maneuver defense is to buy time, but the Russians are not interested in that in the South. They want to prevent the Ukrainians from reaching Azov Sea at any cost, as that would be the real unrivaled game-changer in this war at the strategic level. Also, another purpose is to mess up the enemy’s logistics, which makes sense if the enemy has to advance like 100 km in a hostile environment, but I doubt that this can apply to the Ukrainians in this context. I really don’t know if what we are seeing can fit into that definition, to conclude.