As of: February 23, 2024, 5:14 a.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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The war in Ukraine continues to rage.
© IMAGO / Funke Photo Services // ITAR-TASS
The next convoy to go up in smoke – Ukraine has struck again.
In the south of the country there is a bitter fight for every single tank.
Zaporizhia – The anxious question is: What are the Russians doing now?
Avdiivka is the current victim of the Ukraine war, but which path does Vladimir Putin take now?
If the capture of this minor town has exhausted Russian strength, as it had done at Bakhmut, the Ukrainians may have an opportunity to rally and regroup their forces.
After all, Ukraine is constantly using pinpricks against Russia - as
Newsweek
reports: After that, Ukrainian drones apparently destroyed a convoy with 18 armored vehicles near Zaporizhzhia - including three battle tanks.
A video of this goes viral - the video comes from official sources, but contains no verifiable information.
In addition, the Ukrainian army announced that it had repelled a major air attack by the Russian army in the Zaporizhia region.
The Ukrainian Air Force said: Of 14 drones and ten missiles that Russian forces launched at night at targets in this region of Ukraine, twelve drones and one missile were intercepted.
According to Ukrainian media, at least two people were killed in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Russia may now be focused on retaking territory in the south: Ukrainian military leadership recently told
Newsweek
that it had repelled more than a dozen attacks on its positions around the Zaporizhzhia village of Robotyne.
The
Royal United Services Institute
for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) believes that Russia continues to pursue its strategic goal of completely subjugating Ukraine and is confident of victory after the capture of Avdiivka.
Robotyne: Russia is moving forward again
The Russian Defense Ministry has now announced that it has shot down 70 Ukrainian soldiers and an armored personnel carrier along the sector of the front that includes Robotyne and the nearby village of Verbove.
Newsweek
continues to report findings from the US think tank
Institute for the Study of War
(ISW)
that Russian forces advanced west of Zaporizhzhia and recaptured a position south of Robotyne.
Several Russian military bloggers simultaneously reported on a new offensive by Moscow around the village and that the Kremlin forces were “actively storming this settlement,” as the
ISW
reports.
Ukraine gained control of Robotyne at the end of August as part of its counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 - the most tangible result of its counteroffensive.
Among the terms of surrender currently proposed by Russian mediators is Ukraine's ceding of territory already under Russian control, along with Kharkiv and some areas around Odessa.
Russia also demands that Ukraine refrain from joining NATO and install a head of state of Russia's choosing.
Apparently Russia is letting the rest of Ukraine into the European Union in return.
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Avdiivka: Milestone in Putin's campaign
The incompatibility of the positions of both opponents is a consensus in science, as the American political scientist John Mearsheimer
explained to the magazine
Cicero : Russia lacks the will to return Crimea and the four other areas in eastern Ukraine to Ukraine;
Ukraine absolutely wants these areas back.
“So when you talk about Ukraine's relations with the West and the territorial dispute between Kiev and Moscow, you quickly realize that there is no way to reconcile the different views and conclude a meaningful peace agreement,” he says – a bleak prognosis.
Russia lost a significant number of armored vehicles in the first weeks of the attack on Avdiivka, and Western analysts suspected that Moscow's forces there had switched to infantry attacks to conserve their armor - perhaps actually a tangible result of Ukrainian delaying tactics.
"The Ukrainian defenders inflicted enormous losses on the enemy and destroyed a significant reserve of the Russian occupiers that they planned to use for offensive operations in other areas of the front," Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told
Newsweek
.
Tarnavskyi is the commander of the Ukrainian Tavria group, which fought in Avdiivka.
Seen in this light, any Russian loss of people or material appears to give Ukraine breathing room.
The West: Ukraine depends on the drip of the NATO countries
But only with reservations: British intelligence suspects that Russia's industry is capable of producing at least 100 battle tanks every month alone - not to mention the air force and the navy.
This will compensate for the current losses.
Because the Russians have managed to significantly reduce their tank losses compared to the first year of the war in 2022, according to the British on X (formerly Twitter).
Their hopeless conclusion, according to
Stern
, is that recent offensives have yielded only small gains for the Russians on the ground, but they can "continue this level of offensive activity into the foreseeable future."
What in turn puts the Western powers under enormous pressure to act: Russian determination relies on the trust in the hesitation of Western countries to supply Ukraine more than before - which
leads Jack Watling from
RUSI to the thesis.
“If Ukraine's partners continue to provide its army with sufficient ammunition and training support to mitigate Russian attacks in 2024, it is unlikely that Russia will achieve significant success in 2025.
If Russia sees no prospect of success in 2025 due to its inability to improve the quality of the armed forces for offensive operations, this means that it will have difficulty forcing Kiev to surrender by 2026.”
Watling believes that after 2026, the mutual attrition will end with Russia's fighting strength extinguished.
(Karsten Hinzmann)