Ukraine has stepped up its long-awaited counter-offensive.
In places spread over hundreds of kilometers on the front in the provinces of Zaporizhia and Donetsk, fighting is fiercer than before this week.
Initial reports indicate that Ukraine is encountering stiff resistance: Russia has had time to prepare. The occupying troops can fall back on several lines of defense to regain lost positions from there, while the liberators have to plow through minefields. No major breakthroughs have yet been reported.
Summer Offensive
Thus a spring offensive becomes a summer offensive. In May there was already an increase in drone attacks and there were high profile attacks by ‘Russian rebels’ fighting for Ukraine on Russian border regions. From a military point of view, these operations were probably aimed at drawing Russian troops and air defenses from the front to Russia.
But now the Western tanks and armored cars that Ukraine was promised last winter are actually being deployed at the front. The Ukrainian army says it has put together twelve brigades especially for the counteroffensive, nine of which have been equipped and trained with new Western weaponry. In total, this concerns about 50,000 soldiers. Not all of these men would be on the attack yet.
“The Ukrainian counter-offensive is likely to consist of several operations of varying magnitude,” writes the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW). “The smaller attempts are not representative of the total capacity of the Ukrainian troops or their effectiveness.”
Advances on the flanks
In other words, small attacks can apparently make little progress, but that says little about the offensive as a whole. The fact that Ukraine is now launching the attack in the province of Zaporizhia may also distort the picture. It is to be expected that the Russian defense is best organized there, because Ukraine can also deal the biggest blow there with the cutting of the Russian land bridge to Crimea.
One of the places where Kiev may hope to meet a weakened opponent is Bachmut. Yevgeny Prigozhin seems to have put his money where his mouth is and to have largely withdrawn his Wagner mercenaries from this city. Regular army airborne troops have reportedly taken over their spots. The Ukrainian army would now be advancing on the flanks north and south of the city.
The week started with a hack of TV channels on the occupied Crimean peninsula, where Ukrainian soldiers put their index finger to their lips in a video to say: shut up about what you see. As with previous counter-offensives in the Kharkov and Kherson regions, Ukraine is pursuing a policy of silence.
War bloggers give a more realistic picture
The picture of the attacks is therefore discolored by the official statements of the Russian Ministry of Defense. They can give an impression of where the fighting is taking place, but they always include figures of Ukrainian losses to troops that have little to do with reality.
Russian pro-war bloggers often give a more realistic picture of the battle and ridicule the official information from the army command. For example, the first Leopard tanks that were destroyed from the air on released videos looked suspiciously like tractors and combiners, according to some Telegram accounts. Wagner boss Prigozhin also reacted ironically: “Those tanks were masked as agricultural vehicles and had their barrel pointing downwards. Yet our anti-tank missiles have managed to recognize enemy tanks in them.”