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 to receive its first F-16 fighter jets from its Western allies, a new weapon that could change the balance of forces in the skies, something essential for advances on the ground.
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 took place 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 August 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 traveled 16 miles (26 km).
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 Slovyansk, which, along with Kramatorsk, forms the backbone of Ukraine’s defense in Donetsk.
But Russia obscured the direction from which the greatest advance would come for Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, prioritizing other fronts at other times.
For example, Ukraine’s General Staff said on Friday that Russian attacks were expanding in Toretsk, a frontline of the city 50 kilometers east of Pokrovsk. This intensity increased on Sunday when the General Staff said that Toretsk absorbed 80% of the Russian attacks.
About 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Pokrovsk, a fierce war was raging.
Russian forces began to advance through Chasiv Yar, the last floor which the Ukrainians bravely defended to stop another Russian offensive aimed at breaking through to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Geotagged photographs showed on Friday that Russian forces had crossed the Siversky Donets-Donbass canal, a key defensive feature 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 was announcing its departure, an obvious admission that the city would not ultimately be controlled.
“Chasiv Yar is another Ukrainian city that ceased to exist after the so-called ‘liberation’ by the Russians,” the Ukrainian Black Swan strike organization of the 255th Assault Battalion wrote online. “Our battalion defended it for 4 months, firmly maintaining 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 that proceeded to blow away 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.
Ukrainian base forces commander Oleksandr Pavlyuk gave the weekly tally of Russian losses on Sunday: 8,220 soldiers, 67 tanks and 160 armored fighting vehicles, typical Russian weekly losses in recent months. Al Jazeera may independently determine the number of victims.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had set the conquest of Donetsk and Luhansk as the objective of his armies until last February, on the occasion of the anniversary of the war.
In June, he told Ukraine that he would only agree to a ceasefire and peace talks if Ukraine ceded those two provinces, plus 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 passed a new mobilization law aimed at gathering another quarter of a million troops, he said.
“It’s accidental,” said Hnatov, who commanded the Khortytsian organization of forces facing the fiercest fighting in Donetsk.
“The enemy’s genuine goal is not to capture 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to nine miles) of our territory there. . . The enemy’s purpose is to do everything possible so that we do not temporarily feel the effects of mobilization. “
Konstantyn Mashovets, a retired Ukrainian colonel who comments on the army’s developments, said Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk region were “inferior to the enemy in terms of strength and means. . . especially in the air component and artillery,” and called the Russian advance “slow but quite slow. ” confident. “
But Ukraine played a defensive role that took Putin years (by some estimates, 14 years) to complete his conquest of Luhansk and Donetsk.
It appears he did this to buy time for a strategy in which he believes he has the advantage: drones to undermine Russian strength on land, sea and air.
A Russian military journalist said the Ukrainian strategy is “catastrophic” for Russian forces in Siversk, where “enemy drones [in the first person] dismantle all the canoes and burrows they know, and there is no way to dig new general shelters, because they burn in the early stages of construction. “
Ukraine has released videos showing the skill 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 idling armored fighting vehicle, or a top-speed patrol boat, or 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 so impressive that, in some areas, Russian forces have reportedly counted on Ukrainian losses of up to a quarter of their drones.
But Ukraine has also used drones and aerial missiles to devastating effect in 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. “As a result of the impact, the ship sank on the spot,” the general said Friday.
Rostov-on-Don was first broken in an attack in September last year.
“It was then repaired and tested in the aquarium of the port of Sevastopol,” Ukrainian staff said. Satellite photographs captured on Aug. 2 via Planet Labs PBC suggest that Ukrainian forces destroyed 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.
His staff said ammunition depots containing bombs had been destroyed. The video showed secondary explosions at the site, supporting this claim. Russian resources said 55 Ukrainian drones were involved, and a military journalist 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 aircraft at each and every opportunity was the right thing to do. Russia has attacked Ukraine with 600 bombs in a 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 population. “
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday it had repelled an “invasion” of Russian territory through Ukrainian forces, 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 made such raids on Russian soil during the war, but Ukrainian infantrymen have not.