Ukraine continued its slow rearguard action over the past week, ceding ground in feet and inches to save the lives of its infantrymen while managing to prevent a Russian advance at any point on its front line.
Meanwhile, it has begun receiving its first F-16 fighter jets from its Western allies, a new weapon that could change the balance of power in the skies, key to ground breakthroughs.
It has continued to build some 15 new battalions with which it plans to one day launch a counteroffensive to roll back Russian gains.
The fiercest fighting occurred in central Donetsk, the eastern province that saw many of the bloodiest battles of this war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Pokrovsk amid Russian efforts on Aug. 1.
“Pokrovsk, I would say for today, is a precedent for them. . . the largest number of personnel, the largest number of weapons and [gliding bombs], everything they have, is concentrated today in the direction of Pokrovsky,” Zelenskyy. he said as reported through Suspilne, the Ukrainian public channel.
Pokrovsk is 20 kilometers from the tip of a salient that Russian forces have created west of Avdiivka since February.
Over the next six months, they covered 26 km (16 miles).
Russian forces completed the capture of Vesele, at the tip of this salient, on August 4.
Russia’s ultimate goal, Zelensky said, is to capture Slaviansk, which, along with Kramatorsk, forms the backbone of Ukraine’s defense in Donetsk.
But Russia obscured the direction from which the biggest breakthrough would come for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, prioritizing other fronts at other times.
For example, the Ukrainian General Staff said on Friday that Russian attacks were expanding in Toretsk, a frontline city 50 kilometers east of Pokrovsk. This intensity increased on Sunday when the General Staff declared that Toretsk absorbed 80% of Russian attacks.
About 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Pokrovsk, a fierce war was raging.
Russian forces began advancing through Chasiv Yar, the peak that the Ukrainians bravely defended to stop another Russian offensive aimed at breaking through to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Geotagged photographs on Friday showed that Russian forces had crossed the Siversky Donets-Donbas canal, a key defensive detail that had kept them at bay for months.
On Monday, the Ukrainian General Staff said that attacks on Chasiv Yar were still being repelled, but that a Ukrainian formation announced its departure, an obvious admission that the city would not be controlled after all.
“Chasiv Yar is another Ukrainian city that ceased to exist after the so-called ‘liberation’ by the Russians,” the Ukrainian Black Swan attack organization of the 255th Assault Battalion wrote online. “Our battalion defended it for 4 months, firmly holding the positions assigned to us. Now is the time to rest and prepare for new tasks,” he added.
Videos taken by the battalion showed an abandoned and empty city, with occasional artillery explosions on August 5 proceeding to destroy the abandoned concrete skeletons of the buildings.
When asked in late June by the Philadelphia Inquirer whether Ukraine would manage to retain Chassiv Yar, Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyril Budanov responded: “I will refrain from answering. “
All of those gains came at a high price.
The commander of Ukrainian base forces, Oleksandr Pavlyuk, gave the weekly Russian loss tally on Sunday: 8,220 soldiers, 67 tanks and 160 armored fighting vehicles, weekly losses typical of Russia in recent months. Al Jazeera cannot independently determine the death toll.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had set the conquest of Donetsk and Luhansk as the objective of his armies until last February, on the anniversary of the war.
In June, he told Ukraine he would accept a ceasefire and peace talks if Ukraine returned those two provinces, as well as Zaporizhia and Kherson, which Russia also partially occupies.
Ukraine’s inability to adapt to the strength of Russian troops and firepower appears to justify Putin’s war of attrition strategy to prevent Ukraine from regaining the initiative.
Ukrainian Brigadier General Andriy Hnatov said as much in an interview on Friday.
Putin introduced his incursion on May 10 into the Kharkiv region of northern Ukraine, a month after Ukraine implemented a new mobilization law aimed at gathering a quarter of a million more troops, he said. he declared.
“This is accidental,” said Hnatov, who commanded the Khortytsia organization of forces facing the fiercest fighting in Donetsk.
“The enemy’s real purpose is not to take 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to nine miles) of our territory there. . . the enemy’s purpose is to do everything possible so that we cannot temporarily feel the effects of the mobilization. “
Konstantyn Mashovets, a retired Ukrainian colonel who comments on the evolving situation in the army, said Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk region were “inferior to the enemy in terms of forces and means. . . especially in the air and artillery component,” and described the Russians. advance as “slow but quite slow”. safe”.
But Ukraine played a defensive role and it took Putin years (by some estimates, 14 years) to complete his conquest of Luhansk and Donetsk.
It turns out that he did this to buy time for a strategy in which he believes he has the advantage: drones to undermine the Russian force on land, sea and air.
A Russian military journalist called the Ukrainian strategy “catastrophic” for Russian forces in Siversk, where “enemy [first-person] drones are dismantling all the shelters and burrows they know of, and there is no way to dig new general shelters, as they burn in the early stages of construction. “
Ukraine has released videos showing the prowess of its drone operators.
In one of them, drones sail in canoes towards Zaporizhia.
In other cases, a drone drops an explosive into the open hatch of an armored fighting vehicle in slow motion, or into a patrol boat at maximum speed, or onto motorcycles: all of these effects require maximum precision.
Ukraine announced this year that it would build one million FPV drones. Their production rates have been such that, in some areas, Russian forces have reportedly relied on Ukrainian casualties for up to a quarter of their drones.
But Ukraine has also used drones and aerial missiles to devastate Russian and Russian-occupied territories.
Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian missiles had “finished” Rostov-on-Don, a $300 million Kilo-class Russian diesel submarine docked in Sevastopol. “Upon impact, the ship sank on the spot,” the general said Friday.
Rostov-on-Don was first broken in an attack in September last year.
“Then it was repaired and tested in the Sevastopol port aquarium,” the Ukrainian staff said. Satellite photographs captured on August 2 via Planet Labs PBC suggest that Ukrainian forces wrecked the submarine.
The same attack destroyed one S-400 rocket launcher and broke another, the satellite showed.
On Saturday, Ukraine attacked the Morozovsk airfield in Rostov.
Its staff said that ammunition depots containing bombs had been destroyed. The video showed secondary explosions at the scene, which corroborates this claim. Russian resources said 55 Ukrainian drones were involved, and an army reporter said 18 of them hit their target, destroying a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber.
Ukraine said its forces attacked oil facilities in Rostov, Kursk and Belgorod.
Zelenskyy wrote on social media that attacking Russian airfields and planes at each and every opportunity was the right thing to do. Russia has attacked Ukraine with six hundred bombs in one week, he said, a figure consistent with what he told reporters in April. “This is the only way to realistically ensure some coverage for our people. “
The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had repelled an “invasion” of Russian territory by Ukrainian forces with a battalion of armored fighting vehicles and tanks. Ukrainian forces, according to the statement, introduced a double attack from Sumy to Kursk.
Satellite photographs showed destroyed cars about 7 kilometers (4 miles) from Russian territory.
Russian anti-Putin fighters have twice carried out such raids on Russian soil during the war, but Ukrainian infantrymen have not.