Ukraine continued its gradual rearguard action over the past week, giving ground by feet and inches to preserve the lives of its soldiers, while managing to prevent a Russian advance anywhere along its front line.
Meanwhile, it has begun receiving its first F-16 fighters from Western allies, a new weapon that could help change the balance of power in the skies, which is key to developments on the ground.
It also continued to build around 15 new battalions which it counts on to one day mount a counter-offensive that will reverse Russian conquests.
The fighting was fiercest in central Donetsk, the eastern province that saw many of the bloodiest battles of this war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Pokrovsk was the focus of Russian efforts on August 1.
“Pokrovsk, I would say today is a priority for them… the greatest number of personnel, the greatest number of weapons and [glide bombs]everything they have, they are focusing today on the Pokrovsky direction,” said Zelenskyy, quoted by Suspilne, Ukraine’s public broadcaster.
Pokrovsk is 20 km from the tip of a salient that Russian forces have created west of Avdiivka since taking it in February.
Over the next six months, they advanced 26 km (16 miles).
Russian forces completed the capture of Vesele at the tip of this salient on 4 August.
Russia’s ultimate goal, Zelenskyy said, was to take Sloviansk, which, along with Kramatorsk, forms the backbone of Ukraine’s defenses in Donetsk.
But Russia obfuscated the direction from which the main push for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk would come, giving priority to different fronts at different times.
For example, Ukraine’s General Staff said on Friday that Russian attacks were increasing in Toretsk, a front-line city 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Pokrovsk. That intensity increased on Sunday, when the General Staff said Toretsk was absorbing 80% of Russian attacks.
The battle for Chasiv Yar
About 50 km (30 mi) northeast of Pokrovsk, another fierce battle took place.
Russian forces began advancing through Chasiv Yar, a high ground that the Ukrainians courageously defended to delay another Russian offensive to reach Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Geolocated images on Friday showed that Russian forces had crossed the Siversky Donets-Donbas canal, a key defensive feature that had kept them at bay for months.
On Monday, the Ukrainian General Staff said that attacks were still being repelled in Chasiv Yar, however, a Ukrainian formation announced its departure, an apparent admission that the city would not be finally controlled.
“Chasiv Yar is another Ukrainian city that actually ceased to exist after the so-called ‘liberation’ by the Russians,” Ukraine’s Black Swan strike group of the 255th Assault Battalion wrote online. “Our battalion defended it for four months, firmly maintaining the positions assigned to us. Now it’s time to rest and prepare for new tasks,” he posted.
Video taken by the battalion showed a completely deserted and devastated city, with occasional artillery explosions on August 5, continuing to destroy the abandoned concrete skeletons of buildings.
Asked by the Philadelphia Inquirer in late June whether Ukraine would be able to detain Chasiv Yar, Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyril Budanov said: “I will refrain from answering.”
All these gains came at a high cost.
The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Oleksandr Pavlyuk, released on Sunday the weekly balance of Russian losses: 8,220 soldiers, 67 tanks and 160 armored fighting vehicles – weekly Russian losses typical of recent months. Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify the number of victims.
What is Ukraine’s game?
Russian President Vladimir Putin set the conquest of Donetsk and Luhansk as an objective for his armies until last February, on the second anniversary of the war.
In June, he told Ukraine that he would only agree to a ceasefire and peace talks if Ukraine handed over these two provinces along with Zaporizhia and Kherson, which Russia also partially occupies.
Ukraine’s inability to match Russian troop strength and firepower seemed to justify Putin’s strategy of war of attrition to prevent Ukraine from ever regaining the initiative.
Ukrainian Brigadier General Andriy Hnatov said this in an interview on Friday.
Putin launched his incursion on May 10 in the Kharkiv region of northern Ukraine, a month after Ukraine passed a new mobilization law to deploy 250,000 new troops, he said.
“It’s not accidental,” said Hnatov, who commanded the group of Khortytsia forces facing the fiercest battles in Donetsk.
“The enemy’s real objective was not to capture 10-15 kilometers (6-9 miles) of our territory there… the enemy’s objective was to do everything so that we could not quickly feel the results of the mobilization.”
Konstantyn Mashovets, a retired Ukrainian colonel who regularly comments on military developments, said Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk area were “inferior to the enemy in strength and means… especially in the air component and artillery,” and called the Russian advance “slow but quite confident.”
But Ukraine played defense knowing it would take Putin years – for some estimates 14 years – to complete the conquest of only Luhansk and Donetsk.
He appears to have done this to buy time for a strategy where he considers himself to have an advantage – using drones to undermine Russian power on land, at sea and in the air.
A Russian soldier news reporter said Ukraine’s strategy was “catastrophic” for Russian forces in Siversk, where “the enemy [first person viewer] the drones dismantle all the shelters and dens they know, and there is no way to dig new normal shelters, as they are burning in the first stages of construction.”
Ukraine published videos showing the dexterity of its drone operators.
In one of them, drones dispatch shelters in Zaporizhia.
In others, a drone drops an explosive directly into the open hatch of an idling armored combat vehicle, or a speeding patrol boat, or motorcycles – all attacks requiring great precision.
Ukraine announced this year that it would build one million lightweight FPV drones. Their production rates have been so impressive that, in some areas, Russian forces have reportedly relied on Ukrainian losses for up to a quarter of their drones.
But Ukraine has also used drones and aerial missiles to devastating effect on Russian and Russian-occupied territories.
Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian missiles had “finished off” the Rostov-on-Don, a $300 million Russian Kilo-class diesel submarine docked in Sevastopol. “As a result of the impact, the boat sank on the spot,” the team said on Friday.
Rostov-on-Don was first damaged in an attack in September last year.
“It was subsequently repaired and tested at the Sevastopol port aquarium,” said the Ukraine people. Satellite imagery via Planet Labs PBC captured on August 2 suggested that Ukrainian forces damaged the submarine.
The same attack destroyed one S-400 rocket launcher and damaged another, satellite photographs showed.
On Saturday, Ukraine hit the Morozovsk airfield in Rostov.
His staff said ammunition dumps containing glide bombs had been destroyed. Video showed secondary explosions at the site, corroborating this claim. Russian sources said 55 Ukrainian drones were involved, and a military reporter said 18 of them hit their target, destroying a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber.
Ukraine said its forces also attacked oil installations in Rostov, Kursk and Belgorod.
Zelenskyy wrote on social media that attacking Russian airfields and aircraft at every opportunity was fair. Russia hit Ukraine with 600 glide bombs in one week, he said – a number consistent with what he told journalists in April. “This is the only way to provide realistic protection for our people.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that it defended itself against an “invasion” of Russian territory by Ukrainian forces with armored fighting vehicles and tanks equivalent to a battalion. Ukrainian forces, he said, carried out a two-pronged attack, from Sumy to Kursk.
Satellite images showed destroyed vehicles about 7 km (4 miles) inside Russian territory.
During the war, Russian anti-Putin fighters carried out two such raids on Russian soil, but not Ukrainian soldiers.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
