Russia conquers the most territory from July 2022 | iRADIO

The Russian advance has prompted senior Ukrainian military officials to warn of a possible threat to Ukrainian supply lines and hubs in the east, which now find themselves dangerously close to coming within range of Russian firepower.

The grim news of the advance comes ahead of an expected Russian offensive at the end of May, which could threaten Ukraine’s presence in the Donetsk region and hard-fought, if modest, gains towards the occupied port city of Mariupol.

Russia has thrown huge resources against Ukraine’s weak defenses on the eastern front and is pressing three key points: the important military hub of Pokrovsk west of Avdijivka, the strategic heights of the town of Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut, and Kurachov further south.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that over the past two weeks, the Russian military has captured three villages in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region: Novobakhmutivka, Semenivka and Berdychi. Together with other territory that the Russians have conquered this year, this represents 547 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory gained. This is slightly more than Prague, which covers 496 square kilometers.

On February 17, Ukraine announced its withdrawal from Avdijivka, a town that has been contested for a decade and that Russia apparently sacrificed hundreds of soldiers to capture. However, Moscow’s progress did not stop there.

Over the next ten weeks, as shown by a CNN map and an analysis by Ukrainian monitoring group DeepStateMap, Russian forces slowly took village after village west of Avdijivka, taking advantage of Kiev’s failure to build fortifications and unwillingness to publicly state the extent of its territorial losses in the area.

The article continues under the online report.

Only on Sunday, Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, admitted the fall of a number of villages that his subordinates had said for days were still being fought for. The resulting retreat, according to a CNN analysis, showed Russian forces making the most significant and rapid progress in less than two months since the advance near Severodonetsk in July 2022.

Loss of confidence

Ukraine’s reluctance to admit these losses has led to public criticism from some pro-Ukrainian military bloggers and analysts. The DeepStateMap group, which updates the situation on the front daily, showed significant losses at Avdijivka.

One of the group’s founders, Ruslan Mykula, told CNN they spoke out because they felt the military’s “spokesman has an opportunity to verify the real situation, but (still) gives false information, and that undermines our credibility.”

According to Mykula, the Russian advance near the village of Ocheretyne, which lies west of Avdijivka and was captured by Russia in recent weeks, is “so far a tactical success” but could become “strategic”. “In the current situation, it will be very difficult to stop the enemy because they are pushing in a place that the defense has not paid enough attention to,” he added.

At Avdijivka, he says, there is a lack of defensive fortifications “on the entire left flank” – which effectively means that the open plains are now vulnerable almost all the way to the key road leading to the strategic Pokrovsk.

A window of opportunity

A Ukrainian General Staff spokeswoman said on Tuesday that its forces were defending a number of villages much closer to Pokrovsk than was comfortable. In a speech on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demanded “a significant acceleration of supplies (from the West) in order to significantly strengthen the capabilities of our soldiers.”

He said Ukraine’s defense needed “a force that has to prove itself in the direction of Pokrovsk” and other dangerous front lines in the south near Kurachov, but also in the northeast near Kupyansk.

Another Russian advance towards Kurachov in the southeastern part of the front could threaten the gains Ukraine made during last summer’s counteroffensive. To the north, Russia regularly bombards Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, but is also pushing hard along the front line near Kupyansk to retake territory liberated by Ukraine in its blitzkrieg in late summer 2022.

Ukrainian officials have also publicly warned of a threat to Khasiv Yar, a small town near Bakhmut that Ukrainians lost last May.

Chasiv Yar sits on a hill, and Lt. Col. Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Khortytsia military group, said on Tuesday that Russian forces were seeking to push along a canal near it and seize the town to gain a strategic advantage over key nearby Ukrainian military towns .

“It is very important for them to occupy Chasiv Yar before we receive foreign aid, before we stop running out of ammunition,” Voloshyn said on Ukrainian television.

“If the enemy seizes the dominant heights and the occupiers take hold there, it will be a big problem for us, because then they will immediately come under attack (the cities of) Kosťantynivka, Kramatorsk, Slovjansk and Druzkivka,” he added. If the capture of these four cities, which lie along one road, were seriously threatened, Russia’s goal of controlling the entire Donetsk region would come much closer to being fulfilled.

The next two months will represent a “window of opportunity” for Russian forces, according to Yuri Fedorenko, commander of the attack drone company of the 92nd Separate Attack Brigade. According to him, the Russian army realized that Ukraine would soon have “the necessary means of air defense and the necessary range of ammunition concentrated in the front line, which will make it impossible for the enemy to carry out tasks with the same intensity as now.”

hof, CTK

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