While the DPR obviously expanded their militia with forced mobilization, we don’t see them anywhere in the fight anymore. By November, the army had lost 3,746 killed in action and 15,794 wounded in action, according to the DPR’s ombudsman. The separatist DPR began Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February with around 20,000 men in six light infantry brigades. Just about every single member of Donetsk’s militia was either killed or wounded.
You know how Russian Wagner mercenaries treat their prisoner recruits as cannon fodder, sending them unprepared head-on against Ukrainian defenses? That’s the role that Russia’s two Donbas militias played during the first half of the war. And the local Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) militia that featured heavily in the first six months of the war is mostly gone. But with Russian forces arrayed everywhere but here, there’s a chance for the kind of lightning strike that could catch the city’s defenders unaware. Indeed, this front looks barely changed after 14 months of war, as Russia has been utterly incapable of pushing deeper into Donetsk’s suburbs to give themselves a cushion. It does much of what Tokmak does: split the Russian army in two, without having to punch through the kind of defensive works protecting Tokmak. That makes it a strategically important logistical hub. Look at the maps above, and you’ll see that it’s also a rail hub, intersecting with a major highway, the T0803. Air supply is possible, but unsustainable to support large-scale combat operations.Īnother possible approach is toward the small town of Rozivka. Ukraine’s stash of Harpoon anti-sea missiles can threaten attempts to resupply Crimea’s from the sea. But drive along the coast a bit, toward Prymorsk, and the bridge is inside the GLSDB rockets’ public specs.Īt that point, Ukraine can do to Crimea what they did to Kherson-cut all supply routes-from the land bridge and from the Kerch Bridge. Usually, actual range is beyond any publicly published specs, so the Kerch Bridge might be in range from Berdyansk itself (164 kilometers away). The GLSDB rockets Ukraine will be getting later this year have a published range of 150 kilometers. (Yeah, yeah, it’s a right-wing think tank, but this map is solid.) Let’s start with the map of all Russian fortifications, painstakingly tallied from satellite imagery by the American Enterprise Institute’s Brady Africk.
Ukraine wants to draw them back in, to thin out more important areas of the front.Ĭan you feel the buzz in the air? Ukraine’s big counteroffensive is coming! And just like mock drafts before NFL draft day, war analysts (and Russian generals, maybe) are poring over maps, trying to divine Ukraine’s gambit. This is what’s called a “diversion.” According to Russian sources like Rybar, Russia has emptied the area of any forces. K0ohYs0mQX- George Barros April 23, 2023
This assessment uses a combination of multi-sourced Russian-provided textual reports about Ukrainian activity in this area as well as available geolocated combat footage. Unpacking this assessment in our change of control of terrain around the Dnipro River delta.
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