Russia punches through weakened lines in eastern Ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine – Russian forces have made rapid gains in the eastern Donetsk region over the past week or so, capturing a few villages and closing in on the city of Pokrovsk, one of the main Ukrainian defensive strongholds in the area.

Russian forces are now only a dozen miles from Pokrovsk after Moscow’s troops pushed along a railway line and advanced about 3 miles toward the city, according to open-source maps of the battlefield based on combat footage and satellite imagery. The Russian progress contrasts sharply with the slow but steady gains that Moscow had made so far this year in the Donetsk region, sometimes measured in only a few hundred yards a week.

Military analysts say the swift gains reflect Moscow’s improved ability to exploit cracks in Ukrainian defensive lines, which have been thinned by manpower shortages and strained by relentless Russian attacks along a more than 600-mile front.

In recent months, the experts say, Russian forces have increasingly focused on identifying weakened and poorly organized Ukrainian units before breaking through by throwing scores of troops and armored vehicles onto the battlefield.

“Russians probe the lines to see if a battalion holds or retreats,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine. Once they “find weakened battalions and brigades,” he added, “they press them no matter the losses.”

An example was Russia’s capture last week of the eastern village of Prohres. DeepState, an analytical group with close ties to Ukraine’s army, said the capture followed what it described as a chaotic Ukrainian retreat, as soldiers north of the village were encircled by the Russians and escaped only after the troops ignored their commander’s order not to break out of the encirclement, DeepState said.

The hasty retreat appears to have allowed Russian forces to quickly capture more land. Since the fall of Prohres, they have seized more than 10 square miles of territory, according to DeepState’s battlefield map.

Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern military command, declined to comment on the situation.

Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, the deputy battalion commander for Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade, which was rushed to help Ukrainian troops in the area, told Hromadske, a Ukrainian news outlet, that the disorderly withdrawal led to unnecessary casualties. He said it would have been possible to better organize the retreat and prepare more solid defensive lines further back to stop the Russian advance.

Yuri Butusov, a Ukrainian military journalist, said Russia “attacks first and foremost those brigades that have the weakest command and organization.”

“When a poorly managed crew is attacked, it can’t hold,” he wrote on Facebook.

Ukraine has faced similar battlefield challenges in recent months, with its troops either trapped in chaotic retreats or bungling rotations that allow Russia to quickly seize land.

In Avdiivka, an eastern city that Russia captured in February, Ukrainian soldiers said a failure to execute an orderly withdrawal cost lives and led to the capture of many soldiers. About two months later, the fall of Ocheretyne, a village northwest of Avdiivka, was partly blamed on a failure to properly rotate Ukrainian troops, leaving the sector undefended.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst, said “rotations are usually the most dangerous moment” for an army because they leave positions only partially manned as soldiers pull back.

Gady said ever-present surveillance drones hovering over the battlefield have made these rotations extremely difficult to carry out, particularly for Ukraine, whose defensive lines are already thin because of manpower shortages. Russia often tries to attack and advance just as Ukraine conducts rotations, Gady said.

Bielieskov, of the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said Russian advances so far had not translated into “major breakthroughs” that would allow Moscow to capture all of the Donetsk region, one of the Kremlin’s top military goals.

Still, Russia’s recent advances are threatening Ukraine’s last defensive belt in the Donetsk region. Russian forces are now within artillery range of a key road linking Pokrovsk to other Ukrainian strongholds in the area.

“The situation is critical, as the pace of the enemy’s advance is worrying,” Butusov said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.