After a relative tactical pause, the Ukrainian War entered its third major phase. Kiev expanded the movements of its first counteroffensive, while Moscow resumed the advance in the east and greatly intensified its missile attacks on Thursday (28), the 155th day of the Russian invasion of its neighbour.
There hasn’t been such dynamics on the battlefield since Russia ended its conquest of Lugansk, one of the two provinces that make up Donbass (Russian-speaking east of the country), just over three weeks ago. Since then, the war has obviously continued, but with punctual actions.
Now Ukraine is working to isolate Russian forces in Kherson, the first major city conquered by Moscow early in the war. A port in the south of the country, it is the capital of the homonymous province, whose Russian control established a bridge between Donbass and Crimea, annexed by Vladimir Putin in 2014.
This week, Kiev intensified attacks on the main bridge linking the city area with the rest of the province, separated by the Dnieper River. Here, a strategic dilemma and a tactical limitation come in at the same time.
The bridge in question, Antonivski, is 1 km long. It had its runway damaged with the use of western long-range artillery at the disposal of the Ukrainians – for the accuracy of the attacks, probably Excalibur GPS guided ammunition, fired by howitzers, and not the famous missiles of the Himars system.
The Russians say they have established pontoons and a ferry crossing as an alternative, but they are vulnerable in Kherson, at risk of becoming isolated. Losing the city would be a major strategic defeat for Moscow’s now explicit claim to conquer its neighbor’s south.
As usual in information warfare, Western sources give the Russian situation a lost one. The UK Ministry of Defense says that Moscow has lost its momentum in the south permanently, which is an exaggeration for now.
Then comes the dilemma for Kiev: if it wants to retake Kherson, it will have to bomb it intensively. Merely isolating the Russians does not suggest that they will leave. But the city is still inhabited by its citizens: before the war, there were 283,000 souls there.
This is the tactical limitation of Western weapons. They gave a new operational capability to the Ukrainians, hitting ammunition depots and Russian positions up to 70 km away, but they are useless for occupying a city unless used to destroy it first. Even the refusal so far to blow up the Antonivski bridge or the other one further up the same river passes through this logic.
There are also doubts about the strength of the Ukrainian Army to mount a counteroffensive on the ground, given that it received few armored vehicles and tanks compared to the losses it has had so far. The next few weeks will tell the real condition of the counteroffensive.
The Russians, meanwhile, have since the weekend resumed pressure on the remaining portion under Kiev’s control in Donbass, in Donetsk province. Since 2014, when Crimea was annexed in retaliation for the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government, the area has fallen into civil war and has been divided between Ukrainians and Moscow-backed separatists.
These pro-Russian troops participate in an attack against Adviivka, the frozen front line in Donetsk, next to the province’s eponymous capital. As Igor Girkin, a former military commander in the region and now a critic of the conduct of the war, published on the Telegram, direct assault has everything to go wrong.
A similar assessment is made by the Institute for War Studies in Washington. The center believes that Russia only has the strength for this action and another, so far successful, which took over the Vuhleriska thermal power plant, on the border between Donetsk and Lugansk. Indeed, troops from the Russian Wagner mercenary group were employed there for the first time, rather than regular troops.
In any case, the Russians increased their air strikes on Thursday, which could be a diversionary tactic to withdraw Ukrainian commitment in the south or a harbinger of a more sustained resumption of the campaign. On Sunday (24), Chancellor Sergei Lavrov said with all the letters that the objective, after all, is to overthrow what he called the “unacceptable regime” of Volodymyr Zelensky.
From Crimea, missiles were launched that destroyed a military base near Kiev in Liotij. According to Oleksii Gromov of the Ukrainian General Staff, there were several casualties. More significantly, from Russian bases in Belarus, 25 missiles were launched against positions in the Chernihiv region, the scene of bloody battles at the beginning of the conflict.
Gromov assesses the situation in Donetsk as “quite difficult, but still under control”. The United States has already promised to send more Himars missile systems (so far, 12 have been delivered to the Ukrainians), and other NATO countries continue to drop weapons here and there to Kiev.
In short, the Ukrainian War can be divided into a first phase, in which Putin tried to scare Kiev with a multi-pronged attack and little focus on firepower. He thus faced Ukrainian resistance and failed.
From there the conflict moved to its source, Donbass, where in April the Russians began their new campaign, the most successful so far, despite doubts about the ability to take the entire province of Donetsk. Still unfinished, this second stage is superimposed by the third stage.
