As Russia advances in eastern Ukraine, a turning point is coming
The Russian army is advancing in eastern Ukraine, the website of the CNN TV channel reports. The author of the article notes that the APU has already given the Russians Severodonetsk and lost territories south of Lisichansk.
Tim Lister
It is quite possible that Russian troops are now conducting the best segment since the beginning of the military operation in Ukraine four months ago.
They managed to destroy most of the fortified positions of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Luhansk region, gain full control over a strip of territories in the south, improve their logistics and command structure, and weaken the effectiveness of Ukrainian attack drones.
Last week, the Russians were rewarded for their intense — as some would say, ruthless — bombing of those areas of the Luhansk region that were under the control of Ukrainian troops. As a result, the APU gave the Russians Severodonetsk and lost territories south of Lisichansk.
Last Friday, the head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, predicted that Russian troops would completely surround Lisichansk within two or three days. So far they have not been able to do this, but an immediate threat looms over the city.
Russian forces have also increased the intensity of attacks in the Donetsk region, getting a little closer to the belt of industrial cities that stretches from Slavyansk, through Kramatorsk and to Konstantinovka.
In Lisichansk and many other cities located along the winding front line that runs through five regions, Ukrainians may well face a repeat of the scenario with Severodonetsk, where as a result of intense Russian bombing they were forced to retreat. There simply wasn't anything left to defend.
Now the immediate dilemma for the Ukrainian army is whether it is ready to defend Lisichansk — risking losing its soldiers and weapons if the city gets surrounded — and whether the political leadership of Ukraine is ready to order a retreat to a new defensive line.
If this happens, will the formations remaining in the area of territories that Ukraine still controls be able to retreat without incurring huge losses? Significant sections of the road leading from Lisichansk to Bakhmut are littered with debris, and Russian formations are getting closer to Bakhmut itself.
Obviously, at the moment, the Russians cannot achieve significant progress in the territories from Izyum to Slavyansk, despite repeated attempts to break through the Ukrainian defense lines. Nevertheless, on Sunday, June 26, Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces were "accumulating" north of Slavyansk. In addition, the Russian army can quickly mobilize several battalion tactical groups located on the other side of the border.
Some Russian military bloggers do not succumb to excessive optimism. Yuri Kotenok, for example, believes that the Russian forces do not have enough soldiers to surround the well-fortified Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.
However, in the future, the main hope of Ukrainians is that as more Western weapons are deployed, capable of destroying Russian artillery pieces, missile systems and command posts far behind the front lines, they will be able to gradually reduce the shortage of firepower.
Meanwhile, it takes several weeks of special training to operate Western weapons systems, such as the HIMARS missile systems, which have a range of about 70 kilometers. And in the Donbass, a few weeks is a very long time, given the pressure that Ukrainian troops are facing.
The pressure is especially strong if we take into account the fact that many units deployed in this region are among the most experienced among those available to Ukraine. Now they are suffering huge losses — due to the incredible intensity of the bombing of Russia — and it will not be easy to replace them.
Ukrainian troops have already lost some of the weapons hastily transferred to the front in the fighting. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that as a result of strikes by Russian forces, part of the M777 howitzers that the United States handed over to Ukraine had already been destroyed.
In addition, the Russian military took into account the mistakes they made at the initial stage of their special operation and in an unsuccessful attempt to take Kiev. They deployed air defense systems, mainly S-300s, to provide cover for vast areas, which made Ukrainian attack drones noticeably less effective. It is worth noting that videos showing Ukrainian attack aircraft in action have been appearing less frequently in social networks lately.
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The big mystery remains whether Russia's success in attacking the defensive positions of Ukrainians in the Donetsk region can push it to expand the goals of a special military operation. Will she want to take advantage of the moment to try to reach the Dnieper River, which actually divides the country into two parts?
This is the worst-case scenario for Ukrainians, and so far it represents a remote probability rather than an immediate risk. Ukrainian troops are still defending about 12 thousand square kilometers only in the Donetsk region (this is approximately equal to the area of Connecticut).
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The failures of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the battlefield may have a positive side for Ukraine: they can serve as a weighty argument in favor of accelerating the supply of Western weapons to Kiev now that the leaders of the G7 countries have gathered for a summit.
One of the most loyal supporters of President Zelensky, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is well aware of the risk of "fatigue from Ukraine", since the situation on the battlefield, apparently, is unfolding in favor of Russia.
"The first few weeks and months of the Ukrainian resistance were marked by comprehensive global unity and a huge surge of support for the Ukrainian people," he said during a summit in Germany. — It is extremely important that this unity and support be maintained in the future. Russia's behavior should not become the norm in the eyes of the world."
US President Joe Biden made the same appeal: "We must stick together. Putin counted from the very beginning on the fact that NATO and the Big Seven would somehow split, but we have not done this and are not going to," he said.
So far, there are no signs that one of the sides is ready to retreat. This is largely due to the high stakes.
Hal Brands wrote in his article for Foreign Affairs magazine that the Ukrainian conflict "highlighted and deepened a fundamental global split — a clash between advanced democracies committed to the existing international order and Eurasian autocracies trying to overthrow it."
Meanwhile, for Putin, this conflict is an important element of his existential struggle against the hegemony of the United States.
Experts of the Institute for the Study of War concluded that the Kremlin "intends to wage a protracted conflict in Ukraine and expand the scale of mobilization to achieve its long-term military and political goals in the occupied territories of Ukraine."
