First, the good news: Overall, Russia’s pace continues to slow somewhat. Now the rest. All of these locations spoken of below are shown on the map at the top of the page.
From South to North:
Velyka Novosilka: Ukraine is withdrawing from most and possibly all of the town. With the threat of encirclement, it was time.
Velyka Novosilka: RED is recent Russian advances (2 weeks). GREEN/RED line is present and previous front lines. MAGENTA line is 8 km for scale.
Right click here and open in new tab for larger map.
This isn’t a hugely important town, but it is one of those “hard nuts” that has stood since the beginning. Now, Ukraine must form and develop its next line of defense. Hopefully, they started that process at least weeks (months) ago.
Pokrovsk: Russia APPEARS to be starting to prepare for its direct assault on the town itself, something it has been staying away from for several months. They are cutting supply routes and they SEEM to be preparing to move toward the town from the southwest.
Pokrovsk Area: Lots of pretty arrows. RED area is recent Russian advances (3 weeks). GREEN/RED lines are previous and current front line. I forgot the MAGENTA scale line, but the whole map is just over 40 km wide.
Larger map.
Let’s do the easy one first. To the East of town, for 2-3 weeks now, Russia has been attacking toward the highway (Arrow E) and is now within easy direct fire range of the road. Another week and they will likely physically cut that road.
To the West of town, Russia has been working its way west and then north (Arrow W). This has done two things, one fact and one THEORY:
- Fact: They have cut the road and rail from the southwest. There is another road that is still a couple of KMs to their front. They may (probably) continue to attack north (Arrow ?) until they cut that road and rail as well. That will leave only one main highway into town from due North. Given the many tons of material needed to support 20-30K?? Ukrainian troops in the area, that is not a good situation since Russia can now concentrate assets (artillery, missiles, drones, etc.) on that one main artery from the north. While Russia would like to isolate the town completely, I don’t think this is realistic within the next couple of months.
- Theory: Russia prefers to approach Pokrovsk from the southwest specifically along a line of small towns and wooded area rather than trying to attack across the wide-open fields that dominate the terrain around this town. This lessens the weapons range, accuracy, and likely skill advantages that Ukraine has. With fighting house-to-house and tree-to-tree, this fits Russia’s brute force “throw untrained troops at ‘em” tactics better than trying to charge across kms of open field. Thus, the SOUTHERN approach (Arrow T(heory)) is what I see them developing and using to get to Pokrovsk itself. This could be used in conjunction with an attack along the rail/road from the west.
The good news here is that I see this taking a LONG time.
Update:
I wish I had found this shot yesterday. It’s from the top of a slag heap located 2 km south of Pokrovsk right smack dab in the middle of what I believe will be Russia’s main avenue of approach looking south toward the current Russian positions approx. 2.5 km south (Red Line). It illustrates the terrain that I believe better suits Russia’s sloppy style of fighting.
And the view from the other end of that:
End Update.
Chasiv Yar: Several days ago, Russia secured positions in the upper part of town. I read one article (and maps support it) that Ukraine has pulled out of the large brick factory that is the main defendable structure in the main area of town. This actually happened last week, but, since nothing is moving fast, I waited to have enough news in other areas for a diary.
Chasiv Yar: RED is recent (3 weeks) Russian advances. GREEN lines are weekly front lines. MAGENTA line is 5 km for scale.
Larger map.
Looking west of town for the next defendable line, I don’t see a whole lot until you get to Kostyantinivka a dozen or so km to the SW. It is one of the main towns that long-term stand in the way of further Russian advance (Kostyantinivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk). There are minor folds in the terrain, but nothing big. (My kingdom for a proper contour map.) Kostyantinivka is a BIG town/small city that Russia won’t take. However, they could soon start concentrating artillery fire on it.
Luhansk: Finally, a bit of better news. South of Kupyansk way up at the north end of the line, Russia spent several months attacking toward the Oskil River to cut the northern part of Luhansk province off from Kupyansk.
Luhansk/Kruhliakivka: Red is previous Russian advances. Blue (with arrows) is recent Ukrainian attack. MAGENTA line is 10 km for scale.
Larger map.
Seems perhaps Ukraine doesn’t like that. They have attacked from both the north and south along the river toward the small town of Kruhliakivka with some success. There is was a bridge across the Oskil there as well. It has been knocked out a couple of times, now. Perhaps they can sever that link to the river up there. It’s not a big win, but you take what you can get.
UPDATE: My nightmare is that I spend a while writing one of these things and the mappers publish an update shortly after I publish and everything changes. Well, 4 frickin’ minutes after hitting publish on this diary, they DID update their map and … NOTHING CHANGED!!! WooHoo!