The Russian move prompted senior Ukrainian military officials to warn of the possible by threatening Ukrainian supply lines and nodes 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 on three key points: the important military hub of Pokrovsk west of Avdiyivka, the strategic heights of Khasiv Yar near Bakhmut, and Kurachov further south.
On February 17, Ukraine announced its withdrawal from Avdijivka, a city that has been contested for a decade and that Russia apparently sacrificed hundreds of troops 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 its unwillingness to publicly state the extent of its territorial losses in the area.
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.
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 came forward because they felt the military “the speaker has the opportunity to verify the real situation, but (still) gives false information and this 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 did not pay 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.
Bombed Kharkiv
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 that Ukrainian defense needs “a force that must prove itself in the direction of Pokrovsk” and on other dangerous front lines in the south near Kurachov, but also in the northeast near Kupjansk.
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 late-summer 2022 blitzkrieg.
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 Jar before we get foreign aid… until 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 Kosťantynivka, Kramatorsk, Slovjansk and Druzkivka will immediately come under attack,” 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”.
