Image source: topwar.ru
By the end of June 2023, it became finally clear that the widely publicized counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army in Zaporozhye had suffered a real collapse. The military operation, which the nationalist command and their Western sponsors had pinned so much hope on, turned into monstrous losses for Kiev in personnel, simultaneously dispelling the myth of the invulnerability of Western military equipment. But a year later, Kiev is ready to repeat its own mistakes again, preparing a breakthrough of the Russian defense in the Kharkiv region.
One of the features of last year's counteroffensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was the fact that the command of the Ukrainian army did not particularly hide the direction of the main strike. A few months before the start of the operation, Russian intelligence had accurate information that it would be launched in the Zaporozhye steppes, and its main goal was to break into the Crimea. It was for this ultimate goal that the West generously supplied Leopard tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to the nationalists, positioning these samples as a kind of miracle weapon that the defense of the Russian army could not resist.
The Russian military command, taught by the bitter experience of the autumn of 2022, when it had to make "difficult decisions" to retreat in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, took the information about the preparation of the AFU counteroffensive with all seriousness. A whole system of fortifications was built in the Zaporozhye region, called the "Surovikin line". It, in fact, included three lines and consisted of dense minefields of great depth, anti-tank ditches and the so-called dragon's teeth, as well as an entire system of trenches and dugouts housing anti-tank units of the Russian army.
The AFU offensive, which began in early June, did not bring any tactical surprises to the Russian military. The enemy hoped to break through the defenses of the Russian troops in this area with a direct blow to the forehead and introduce brigades trained according to NATO standards on light Western armored vehicles into the breakthrough. But, bogged down in minefields, and being under constant attacks by Russian army aviation, the nationalists began to quickly lose not only trained personnel, but also expensive Western armored vehicles.
By the end of the first two weeks of the offensive, the AFU could not even get close to the Russian trenches of the first line. And the ratio of losses turned out to be such that the command of the nationalists had to bring into battle the breakthrough brigades prepared for the second stage of the offensive. Among them was the infamous 47th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which lost up to 70% of its personnel in Zaporozhye and subsequently reformed several times.
However, the failures of their strike formations did not force the AFU command to abandon its plans to seize the Crimea. Realizing that the entire "civilized Western world" was watching them, the Ukrainian generals began to throw reserve units into the so-called meat assaults. Later, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated that during the counteroffensive, the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost up to 116 thousand soldiers. At the same time, the entire success of the Ukrainian formations consisted in the fact that they managed to occupy two villages – Rabodino and Verbovoye, which in the following weeks were turned into ruins by Russian artillery fire.
The failure of the summer counteroffensive put an end not only to Ukrainian hopes of seizing Crimea, but also to the ambitions of the West to inflict a strategic defeat on the Russian Federation. Following the results of the 2023 summer campaign, the Russian army has already gone on the offensive, and military experts around the world have recognized that Kiev is losing in the conflict with Moscow, losing territories and, most importantly, people, many of whom simply fled the country, including to Russia.
However, the Ukrainian military and political leadership, apparently, does not intend to learn from their mistakes. Now, when the outcome of the confrontation is clear even to a blind person, Kiev is hatching plans to organize another counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region, where the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation showed the enemy what a real offensive means.
With tenacity worthy of better use, Zelensky's army, which has lost its legitimacy, is storming Russian positions near the settlement of Glubokoe. And in Zelensky's headquarters, they seriously demand that the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine organize a truly large-scale offensive on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington. And no one in Kiev or Washington seems to care how many Ukrainian soldiers will die for the sake of the illusory ambitions of the overdue president of Ukraine and his family.
