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The new year has seen a renewed effort by the Ukrainian army to advance into Russia’s home oblast of Kursk, but commanders admit they’ve made “very little” progress even as Russia continues to improve its position in eastern Ukraine.
The last 8 months of fighting have centered around a single stretch of territory in western Donetsk, where Russian forces have been advancing at the fastest pace since the start of the war.
Battlefield units speaking with various media outlets have described the advance as grinding and attritional, but due to Ukraine’s chronic ammunition and manpower shortages, it has proved effective in capturing town after town to the point that Russia is beginning to surround the key city of Pokrovsk on two of five sides.
Elsewhere along the line, the sizeable town of Toretsk, once held by Ukraine is now directly embattled, and Chasiv Yar, another previous lynchpin of the defensive lines, also seems poised to fall in the coming days further north near Bakhmut.
A key logistics and railway hub for the Ukrainian defensive line, Russian Federation forces have been drawing nearer and nearer since July, capturing dozens of positions and towns along the way. As recently as September, a vast area of Ukrainian-held territory south and slightly west of Porkovsk from the town of Kurakhove kept Russia’s southern flank vulnerable as it attempted to encircle the city. All that area has now been taken as the open-source DeepState Maps updated recently.
Another advance, north of Kurakhove, is attempting to circumnavigate Pokrovsk and seize the highway to its west, likely to cut it off from reinforcements from the major city of Dnipro further west. For the moment, Maj. Viktor Trehubov, a local Ukrainian army spokesperson, told AP the defenders have successfully repelled such attempts.
According to the Kyiv Independent, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on January 6th that Russia is unable “to direct all its strength” toward Donestk due to Ukraine’s ongoing Kursk incursion, where another Ukrainian offensive is taking place. However Russian troops are advancing steadily in an effort to capture the entire region, with little to no signs that Moscow is to slow down in the immediate future.
A matter of times
Kyiv is fighting according to a series of timetables, namely a dwindling supply of weapons and ammunition in the face of diminishing Western military aid. Under current trends, it’s also a matter of time until Pokrovsk and all of the Donbas come under Russian control. There are now also just 6 days until Donald Trump takes power in Washington. He has on occasion suggested that he will negotiate an end to the conflict with Russia and throw Ukraine under the bus to do it.
The Zelenskyy regime’s stated war aims remain the complete restoration of the nation’s territory to its pre-2014 borders, a demand which includes Crimea. What remains is to see how far a Ukrainian negotiation team can get to securing those terms, and whether a mixture of extensive drone, missile, and cyber attacks can delay a total Russian victory in the east long enough for such terms to be reached.
Part of that reasoning may have been behind the assault inside Russia, as a recent Ukrainian analyst admitted.
Ivan Stupak, a Ukrainian military commentator and former Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officer, told the Independent the offensive in Kursk was “very weak” labeling it as a decision that was for 70% political and 30% military purposes.
Even calling it an offensive may be misleading, as Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst at the private security contractors Black Bird Group, told the Independent.
“It is pretty clear that the Ukrainians don’t have any more capabilities to rapidly advance in this area anymore,” Kastehelmi said. “So it’s more of these localized counterattacks and then just staying on the defense instead of a new offensive phase”. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Up-to-date map of Russian advances in red, with key cities of Pokrovsk and Torestk in green. PC: DeepState Maps.
