Big hole near Donetsk. The Russians will use it. The Ukrainians made a big mistake

In recent weeks, under-armed and poorly-supplied Ukrainian forces have been losing ground in eastern Donetsk, which has been contested by Kiev and Moscow-backed separatists since 2014 and has become the new flashpoint of the war, an Arab TV station said Al Jazeera.

The Russians have stepped up their attacks ahead of the arrival of US military aid, which includes anti-tank missiles and 155mm grenades, which can end the desperate “ammunition hunger” of outgunned Ukrainian troops. “For ten shots from their side, we respond with one shot,” a soldier from Donetsk told Al Jazeera. The Russians are pounding Ukrainian trenches, towns and villages with aerial bombs and artillery fire, relentlessly deploying troops several times a day, regardless of the loss of life and armored vehicles, the server said. Ukrainian forces withdrew from Ocheretyn and several other towns and villages, creating a wedge for Russian forces and threatening larger towns in the Kiev-controlled part of Donetsk.

Some Ukrainian soldiers from the 155th Brigade, which took over the defense of the city, blame its fall on the mistakes of their commanders. “My company was literally destroyed, we were performing tasks in the worst conditions and no one cared. We fought back with almost no support and equally stupid command,” wrote one of the soldiers on X, formerly known as twitter. The Russian side predictably triumphs. A pro-Kremlin military analyst blamed the fall of Oleksandr Syrsky, the new commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, on a general lack of weapons, ammunition and air defenses. “The downside is that all of Ukraine knows, all the soldiers know, that there is no money, no equipment, there is a desperate lack of air defense systems,” Vladimir Prokhvatilov of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences told Kremlin-funded Sputnik Radio.

Syrsky replaced Valery Zaluzhny, a hugely popular top general who reportedly fell out with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the counteroffensive strategy and the urgent need to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men. “This is not a breakthrough on a tactical level, but on a strategic level. And that’s why the Russians will only intensify their pressure,” Kyiv analyst Mikhail Žyrochov told Radio NV. “The situation around Ocheretyn in the Donetsk region is very complex and tends to get worse. Because such an approach gives the Russians huge advantages on the wings. That’s why it will be very difficult to maintain other cities, another line of defense,” he said.

“There is a big hole on the Donetsk front that the Russians can advance in three, four directions,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of the German University of Bremen told Al Jazeera. According to him, by deploying additional forces, the Russians can destroy the Ukrainian positions along the Bakhmutka River and advance up to 15 km in the southwest direction without much resistance.

Tyler Weaver, a military analyst, also commented on the situation. In connection with the resounding opinions that the US package of military aid to Ukraine, amounting to almost 61 billion dollars, is suddenly not enough, he doubted that the supply of weapons to Ukraine would ever stop coming. “The Biden administration just stopped reporting on them,” said v https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1786212982965379562?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3KEiwCWOoQUETnAgyDJmPXtfGNVRybaTJlw9wrkMpKoCDD2LcCHpTuMI0_aem_Afp2XpygOdAgBJFKZ6Q4e6jm_eNNCM0UaJygu-Ji2VyYsSelaOGMIC6ZkbuoUB9771hx-G_fQGt_TggjPgBLzFZ- on social network X.

According to him, the Biden administration is systematically violating federal laws to arm Ukraine. And he makes a mockery of the Leahy Amendments, which are US human rights laws that supposedly prohibit the US State Department and the US Defense Department from providing military aid to foreign security forces that violate human rights.

“She didn’t even try to follow the laws in Ukraine, instead she just stuffed weapons into the country and ignored their inevitable return to the hands of the worst of the worst, who became the model of Zelensky’s dictatorial regime,” Weaver criticizes the Biden administration.

The idea that the Biden administration would have the slightest interest in the anti-deficit law (supposedly preventing the federal government from writing bad checks) is beyond ludicrous, and it would hardly be the first time the administration has ignored or aggressively circumvented Congressional financial restraints — doubly so given that these restrictions were imposed by MAGA Republicans, who they consider little more than traitors, the military analyst continues.

“I immediately think of Iran-Contra. Therefore, this latest relief bill should be viewed more as a ratification bill in which Congress would legally appropriate funds that this administration has illegally siphoned from other accounts or simply had the Treasury write bad checks,” reports Tyler Weaver.

“Any close watcher of the war over the last few months could immediately see that the aid never really stopped – despite endless complaints from the Ukrainian side, Western material never arrived or even seemed to be missing, including of course American material such as DPICM artillery shells.

Ukraine received hundreds of these heavy missiles from the United States before the aid bill was signed, presumably with the condition that they would not use them until the bill was passed. They clearly didn’t care about the potential embarrassment of their sponsors and started firing them en masse before the bill passed. At the time, Biden legally had no money or authority to carry out this massive transfer of modern weapons, but he did it anyway,” the military analyst concluded.

Add PL to your favorite feeds on Google News. Thank you