As of: February 13, 2024, 7:02 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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Split
Burnt steel between bombed stones.
Avdiivka will end up in ruins - no matter who wins in the end.
(Archive image) © Francisco Seco/dpa
Avdiivka becomes a symbol of war.
Russia is marching forward with all its might.
Ukraine is stubbornly against it.
Now new tanks are rolling in.
Avdiivka – Carlo Masala was wrong in his assumption.
For now.
Using Avdiivka as an example, the Hamburg political scientist explained in the
Hamburger Abendblatt
that Ukraine had insisted on letting Putin's troops bleed to death as much as possible.
As he says, he expects a “tactical withdrawal” of the Ukrainian defenders from the territory almost every hour.
Masala had said that some time ago.
But the fighting there continues;
The Russians also continue to fight relentlessly for the city, without it being given much importance for the outcome of the war in Ukraine - it stands as a symbol of the mutual showdown between Vladimir Putin and the free world.
Newsweek
is currently reporting that the Russians are apparently taking another breath to push the defenders out of the city - for good: Russian forces are "increasingly adding tank groups to attack infantry groups" stationed around the town, Brigadier General Oleksandr recently said Tarnavskyi, the head of the Ukrainian unit Tavria, which holds Avdiivka.
In mid-October, Russia launched its offensive around Avdiivka, claiming thousands of lives on both sides, even before the grueling winter took hold in Ukraine.
In the months since, Moscow has made slow but steady progress in the area of industrial settlements there.
Contested Avdiivka: Russian troops enter a field of rubble
Newsweek
quotes local journalist Yuri Butussov as saying that the Russians are just over a kilometer away from the city's outskirts.
Butussov reports on his
Telegram
channel about a devastated city.
Observers had initially given Ukraine good chances in defense, but optimism is rapidly dwindling.
The Russians' original tactic appears to have been to surprise their defenders through self-dug tunnels, cellars and sewers - that was the approach from the end of last year, a spokesman for the 110th separate mechanized brigade, Anton Kotsukon, told the Ukrainian news agency Unian had reported: “They are digging tunnels closer to our positions, firstly for the purpose of camouflage and secondly in order to unexpectedly appear somewhere closer to our positions.” Now Russia seems to want to force a decision with the massive use of vehicles;
apparently by hook or by crook.
Time is of the essence - Russian troops have been grinding away around the town for almost five months.
The road to Avdiivka: paved with wrecks and fallen soldiers
By driving these wedges into Ukrainian-held areas, the Russians appear to be trying to create small pockets, small encirclements, within the contested Avdiivka region.
In order to avoid encirclement, the Ukrainian troops may have to gradually withdraw from several positions and straighten their lines, most likely in the southern part of the ruined city - this is how ZDF analyzes
the
current situation.
Taking Avdiivka would allow Moscow to significantly expand its logistical operations and restrict Ukraine's mobility against Russian positions in the regional capital Donetsk.
That, in turn, would pave Russia's way to Kostyantynivka - a "pretty important fortress," former Ukrainian colonel Serhiy Hrabsky told
Newsweek
.
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Vehicle losses were a characteristic of the Russian offensive efforts around Avdiivka from the beginning.
According to comparisons of satellite images by data analysts at
Frontelligence Insight,
Moscow lost more than 211 vehicles around Avdiivka alone between the start of its offensive on the city on October 10 and the end of the year.
The British estimate is even more comprehensive: The British Ministry of Defense assumes that Russia lost around 200 armored vehicles in the first three weeks of the Avdiivka offensive alone.
Russia's game with history: Avdiivka could become a second Grozny
“Fighting in built-up terrain is one of the most stressful and challenging tasks for soldiers and especially their superiors in a war,” said former Bundeswehr Major General Walter Spindler to the Stuttgarter
Nachrichten.
The defenders would have the immense advantages of knowing their city intimately, having prepared it for defense and having their plans tailored in detail to local conditions.
In return, attackers could only use tanks and vehicles to a limited and ineffective extent.
In the tactical regulations of Western armies, a superiority of 7:1 is required, in the Russian regulations even of 9:1, in order to successfully conquer a city, he explains.
The former infantry officer therefore considers the use of tanks to be a tactical variant born out of necessity - in his opinion, tanks are of no real help to the infantrymen in urban warfare.
In any case, the infantrymen would first have to secure the tanks against enemy fire.
Spindler: “Tank crews can only observe the battlefield from the tank through armored glass about the size of a brick, the so-called angle mirrors.
This limits your view enormously.
In addition, tanks and armored personnel carriers can only fire over short distances of up to around 150 meters instead of the actual 3,500 to 4,500 meters.
The vehicles are exposed to attacks such as those with rocket-propelled grenades or Molotov cocktails delivered to Ukraine from Western countries. “In addition, they have to sneak through the city anyway: rubble blocks roads and spaces, especially when these barriers are also mined - on each one The risk lurks in the corner.
Molotov cocktail – the primitive grenade
The Molotov cocktail takes its name from Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov;
He was an influential Soviet politician between 1920 and 1950 - for example as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.
On November 30, 1930, three months after the German attack on Poland, the “Winter War” began: Soviet soldiers crossed the Finnish border in Karelia, and Red Army planes dropped cluster bombs on Helsinki and other cities.
But Molotov tried to conceal the attack.
In a radio speech he said that the Soviet bombers were dropping food for the supposedly starving population.
The Finns treated the cluster bombs with black humor and called them “Molotov breadbaskets”.
Soldiers had been using bottles with flammable liquids on a massive scale in wars since the mid-1930s.
Infantrymen fought with the new old weapons on three continents: the Chinese near Shanghai against Japan, the Abyssinians in Ethiopia against Italian invaders and the fascists under General Franco in Spain against Republican troops.
Tanks have always had weak points: burning liquid could get inside through the viewing slits in the driver's cabins and the ventilation slots in the engines.
Especially when tanks drive slowly, they are easy targets for incendiary devices.
The Finnish army was hopelessly inferior to Russia and increasingly relied on incendiary bottles to defend itself against tanks.
There was a joke among the soldiers that they had to serve Molotov's bread baskets with the right drink.
This is how the name for the incendiary bottles came about: Molotov cocktail.
Source:
Mirror
Vladimir Putin's army crashed into catastrophe with its tanks in a city several years ago.
One of the last battles that tanks fought in a city ended in disaster, as Eastern Europe researcher James Hughes writes for the think tank
Center for Eastern European and International Studies
: “In December 1994, a long column of Russian tanks advanced into the Chechen capital Grozny to put down a nationalist-secessionist uprising.
Russia had assumed that the mere demonstration of military force would lead to the surrender of the insurgents.
However, within a few hours the column was completely wiped out by Chechen fighters.
Russia lost about 200 armored vehicles, and around 1,000 Russian soldiers were killed or captured.” The tank belongs on the battlefield.
Cities are alien to him.
“The current situation at Avdiivka is a microcosm of the Russian General Staff's broader failure to internalize and pass on to other troop groups throughout the region the lessons its troops have learned from previous failed offensive efforts in Ukraine,” the
Institute for the Russian Federation said
Study of War (ISW)
.
Avdiivka's Conquest: A campaign that will consume a lot of personnel
Essentially, the battle for Avdiivka demands a tactical performance from the military leadership, something the Russians have consistently failed to deliver.
Much more than the performance of tanks and artillery, the infantry is crucial to success in local and urban warfare, said Lieutenant Colonel Andre Knappe, battalion commander of the German Air Force's Object Protection Regiment.
In addition, reconnaissance is of great importance - for example through drones.
In principle, the attacking side always pursues the advantage of the defenders.
The sheer mass of attacking personnel or material increases the number of victims, but does not lead to any immediate gain.
This makes taking over a larger, densely built-up town an “almost impossible task,” said Knappe.
The Russian armed forces had already tried to force Kiev under their thumb at the beginning of the war - but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
Their offensive had already been stopped in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital.
Bringing such a confusing territory under one's own control is always an immense task - no matter how different the cities may be, says the lieutenant colonel.
“They need a lot of staff to do that.”
Therefore, even if the Russians do eventually succeed in encircling Avdiivka, it will be the result of a slow, creeping advance rather than a blitzkrieg-like, destructive breakthrough that gives the remaining defenders enough time to retreat and thus avoid encirclement.
And every time the opponents delay, the defenders gain the upper hand.
Dmytro Lazutkin, spokesman for the 47th Ukrainian Brigade fighting around Avdiivka, told
Newsweek
in December : "Defending the city is worth it as long as we exhaust the Russians."
The dogged Russian offensive efforts prove that the Ukrainians continue to resist stubbornly.
The war will continue to simmer.