To Pokrovsk, where 60 thousand people once lived. people, war has come and the Russians are believed to be about eight kilometers away. Thousands of people flee the city every week. Experts say Russian artillery and drones can now reach Pokrovsk, which is already affecting the city’s potential as a logistics hub for the Ukrainian military.
According to Western and Ukrainian military analysts interviewed by The Kyiv Independent newspaper, Russian forces have launched a new offensive below Pokrovsk in an attempt to consolidate its southern flank and create a base for a further assault on the city.
The lack of Ukrainian soldiers and tactical mistakes led to the fact that the Russian army is advancing more and more rapidly towards Pokrovsk, experts told the publication. But analysts are skeptical of a Russian breakthrough further east, even if the city falls, because capturing it would require significant resources that would likely exhaust Russia’s offensive capabilities.
“(Russia’s potential) capture of Pokrovsk will complicate logistics and deal a PR blow to the Ukrainians, but I don’t think it will have much of an impact on the battlefield,” said Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan, a Poland-based military consultancy.
“The capture of Pokrovsk could lead to higher losses only if they were further increased by the lack of manpower, lack of artillery ammunition, errors in command and control, etc.,” he added.
The traditional problems of the Ukrainian army remained consistent throughout the war: lack of manpower, artillery ammunition and fortifications. If Russian troops take Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s ability to take a position on its problem would be a decisive factor in preventing further Russian penetration into the rest of the Ukrainian-held Donetsk region.
Russia has always sought to occupy higher ground such as Pokrovsk, from where it could control drones and launch artillery strikes, but we must remember that Russia is quite bad at conducting large-scale operations,” said K. Muzyka.
“So while they’re making tactical progress, they’re failing to translate those tactical victories into operational-level gains,” he added.
Located less than 20 kilometers east of neighboring Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Pokrovsk has a railway station and is the entry point to Donbass from cities to the west, including Dnipro. The T0504 highway runs through the city, which was the main logistics artery for Ukrainian troops traveling between Pokrovsk and the upper parts of Donetsk Oblast – such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – until Russian troops came dangerously close to the road this spring.
“The loss of (Pokrovsk) as a supply base and an important crossroads of movement is very unfortunate and very painful,” said Pasi Paroinen of the Black Bird Group, a Finland-based open-source analysis group.
“But if the situation can be stabilized in a different way so that the Russians don’t just move forward freely, at the pace they’re moving forward now, or even faster… in that case it really won’t matter that (Ukraine) lost a few villages here and there, and maybe he lost Pokrovska,” he added.
The analyst said he was worried that “the situation in the Pokrovsk sector is not under (the Ukrainians’) control” and that “controlling it will require more and more resources every day.”
“The further the Russians advance, the more they untie the entire front line for movement, the more resources the Ukrainians will need to contain,” Paroinen told The Kyiv Independent.
Russia is “increasing its forces” in the Pokrovsk sector
Kyiv recognized that the Russian offensive towards Pokrovsk is powerful. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in July that Moscow was “throwing everything it has” in Pokrovsk’s direction. But he said Russia’s push toward Pokrovsk had slowed since Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region to divert Russian troops.
Contrary to what the president said, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrsky, admitted that despite the fact that more than 30,000 soldiers were transferred to the Kursk region from other fronts. Russian troops, Moscow is “only increasing its forces” in the Pokrovsk sector.
For the Kremlin, capturing Pokrovsk would be a political conquest similar to the conquest of Bakhmut and Avdijivka in 2023. and 2024 at the beginning, according to Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenka, a regular host of Ukrainian state television. He denied that Pokrovsk had any political meaning, downplaying it as one of many cities in the Donetsk region.
Analysts generally say that the Russian offensive will continue at the same pace in the near future. In the past week, Moscow’s troops have continued to advance towards Pokrovsk at a faster pace, although “the pace of the advance is likely to slow down as Russian ground forces enter Pokrovsk’s built-up areas,” on September 1. the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence report.
The fate of Pokrovsk will depend on Ukraine’s ability to solve the problem of manpower and ammunition shortages, which in turn will depend on Kyiv’s priorities. Losing the city to Ukraine would be a logistical blow, threatening the defense of other Donbas cities.
“Every approach to warfare or strategic decision will affect the situation on the front line,” said Polish military analyst K. Muzyka. “Now Ukraine must adapt to the current situation, try to stop the Russians in the Donetsk region.”
“However, it is quite clear that the situation in Kursk (region) is eating up a lot of resources that Ukraine could otherwise send to the Donetsk region,” he added.
Danger south of Pokrovsk
As Russia pushes forward to capture the southern flank of Pokrovsk, a move reminiscent of tactics previously used to capture other Donbas towns such as Avdijivka and Bakhmut, some analysts point out that over Krasnohorivka, nearly 40 kilometers south of Pokrovsk – an alarming scenario is brewing.
According to analysts, Ukrainian troops defending a pocket east of the Vovsha River and surrounded by Russian troops on the remaining three sides could be in danger of being completely encircled.
Ukraine is likely to soon be forced out of the pocket to avoid encirclement, allowing Moscow to capture it “without much fighting,” Austrian military expert Tom Cooper told The Kyiv Independent.
Cooper clarified that Russia is likely seeking to extend its southern flank to “at least 30-40 km to keep logistics out of the sights of most Ukrainian artillery,” as a narrower flank would be more vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks.
Black Bird Group’s Mr. Paroinen said the threat of encirclement of the pocket of Ukraine east of the Vovsha River should not be serious, as long as the withdrawal is timely. Delays would make it “very difficult” to get the trapped soldiers out, he added.
“However, the pace of the Russian advance remains such that, unless something like this (a sudden acceleration of the Russian advance) is done, it should be possible to withdraw in time,” Paroinen said.
A complete encirclement is unlikely because “there is always a way out,” including local and field routes, according to Oleksandr Kovalenka, a Ukrainian military and political analyst at the Kyiv-based Information Resistance think tank. He said that in the lower part of the pocket of Ukraine there is an exit through the areas of the village of Zoriane and the Lozova River, and the threat is not so great when you “explore the roads”.
A blow to the “fragile front”
In recent weeks, Russian troops have been trampling through villages and towns as they approach Pokrovsk at an alarming pace compared to much of 2023-24. Kyiv has not acknowledged how many settlements have been captured by Russian troops since the Kursk offensive began in early August.
Concerned about its more vulnerable southern flank in Pokrovsk, Russian forces launched an offensive near Selydova, experts say.
“To continue Pokrovsk’s attack in this direction, they need to form flanks.” And the southern flank is considered the most painful (for the Russian army),” said O. Kovalenka, clarifying that Moscow probably does not anticipate a Ukrainian counterattack on the northern flank due to its own attack on the Torecko front a little higher, and the southern flank is of greatest concern to it.
According to O. Kovalenko, Russian forces are now trying to advance towards the Lozova River “to cover the entire south and completely cut off the dangerous zone along which Ukrainian forces could attack Pokrovsk from the side.”
Russian forces in the area appear to be depleted of resources: they have been advancing for more than six months from the ruins of Avdiyivka, captured in February, to the town of Novokhrodivka, about 30 kilometers west of Avdiyivka, and are likely in need of an operational pause, the expert said.
“(In the near future) they would simply throw all their resources south (of Pokrovsk) without regrouping, without an operational pause, without restoring combat effectiveness,” Kovalenka said, explaining that Russia likely set a goal of capturing Pokrovsk by the end of the year.
The aim is to make further movement of the Russian forces as difficult as possible, but according to O. Kovalenko, some Ukrainian withdrawals were unexpected. In some areas where Kyiv troops were able to hold their defenses for months, the Russians broke through “quite quickly” because of a lack of organization at the brigade level, which led to poorly executed unit rotations, he added.
Dmytro Zmaylo, co-founder and executive director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a Kyiv-based think tank, told The Kyiv Independent that even as Russian forces work to expand Pokrovsk’s southern flank, they are keeping up with their push toward the city. This is aimed at “so that we don’t dig in and entrench ourselves while (Russian forces) reinforce the flanks,” he explained.
It is expected that Moscow will first try to occupy Selydova, and only then, according to D. Žmayla, will advance towards Pokrovsk from the south along the Karlivka-Pokrovsk road.
Military experts largely agreed that if the Russians entered Pokrovsk, Ukraine would likely be able to sustain the battle for the city for months, turning it into a “relentless manpower war.” However, some experts are skeptical that the Russians can reach the city even before the end of the year, given the rains and inclement weather expected in the fall.
O. Kovalenka said that Russia’s inability to advance in several directions at the same time – not only on the southern flank, but also directly towards Pokrovsk and approaching north towards the T0504 highway – shows that Russia has “limited resources, much more limited than, for example , at the end of May and beginning of June this year”.
Mr Paroinen of Finland’s Black Bird Group disagreed, saying it seemed “a good idea to try to focus on one or at most two forward steps at a time”. He added that another reason why Russia may have decided to focus on marching south of Pokrovsk, rather than storming the city directly, could be that there are “significant Ukrainian defenses” in front of it.
According to Mr. Paroinen, there is a “good chance” of bypassing the Ukrainians from the south in the areas of the cities of Kurachov, Ukrainsk and Vuhledar, where there may be more chances because the area seems less fortified.
The analyst warned that the Russian advance in the Pokrovsk area is “very critical” because the pace is “very even”, although when you zoom in on the map “we are still talking about quite limited areas”.
Admitting that Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk “may not be a complete waste of men and material”, Mr Paroinen said the timing of the bold operation was “highly questionable” – especially as the situation on the key eastern front worsens.
The launch of the most audacious cross-border incursion into Russia in history seems to have come at the cost of other hot spots in the war, from which Ukraine drew battalions to carry out this large-scale operation. U.S.-based military experts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee agreed in a recent Foreign Affairs article that “the attack, in other words, weakened the already fragile Ukrainian front,” and estimated that “in total, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 people participated in it.” soldiers,” including some of Ukraine’s better soldiers.
Mr. Paroinen said that the speed with which the Ukrainian defense can be breached by the grinding Russian attack shows the seriousness of the situation.
“If it falls quickly, it will definitely show that the situation is very bad,” Paroinen said. “I’d rather watch how quickly things develop and draw certain conclusions from that – how bad the situation is.”
Parengta pagal „The Kyiv Independent“ inf.
2024-09-07 08:45:23