As of: April 4, 2024, 4:49 a.m
By: Karsten-Dirk Hinzmann
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It may have been a “massacre,” but it was definitely a fiasco: Russia loses the next battle, but remains closer to winning the war than Ukraine.
Avdiywka - The
t-online
editorial team would now have the opportunity to use a headline that they had already chosen verbatim twice - five months apart: "Russian tank column drives to ruin". The last time the defenders achieved such a coup was in January in the Ukraine war. Now, for example,
Newsweek
is reporting on a new blow against Vladimir Putin's armored troops: According to Kiev, Ukrainian forces have stopped a Russian advance in the south of the country and destroyed 18 of Moscow's armored vehicles, while the Kremlin's troops are gaining ground on the Eastern Front. In addition, Russian forces are said to have lost three tanks during an attack in the southern Zaporizhia region, Ukraine's Western Operations Command has now announced.
Russian déjà vu: In Wuhledar, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin lost his first major tank battle - countless wrecks lined the fields (photo). Now Russia has again lost a lot of tanks near Avdiivka. © dpa
The
Germany editorial network
stylized the Russian advance almost as a small tank battle: “The Russians have not attacked with such a large number of tanks in the more than two-year war against Ukraine for a long time: But the attack by 48 tanks and armored vehicles near the Ukrainian city Avdiivka collapses - a third of the vehicles are lost." What sounds like a hussar's stunt and apparently the Ukrainian defenders' greatest operational success in recent times,
Forbes
puts it more martially: as a "massacre". Thirty-six tanks and 12 BMP armored vehicles from the Russian army's 6th Tank Regiment - part of the 90th Armored Division - attacked
along a road leading from Russian-occupied Tonen'ke to the free village of Uman'ske, two miles west, according to
Forbes
.
Russia has changed tactics: return to tank-based attack
Forbes
author David Ax wants to see two trends in the battle - two contradictory ones, in fact. On the one hand, Russia's return to motorized attack and, on the other, the Ukrainians' ability to reduce massed attacks to rubble: "In the weeks leading up to this attack, Russian regiments and brigades - which appeared to be short of vehicles after having deployed hundreds in mid-February of them who had lost in the conquest of Avdiivka - mostly infantry without motorized forces to attack west of the city." That has now changed, writes Ax based on a sober report from the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies: "The enemy is deployed in the direction of Avdiivka armored vehicles, including tanks, were reintroduced.”
At the same time, the Ukrainians have apparently made a virtue of their necessity: although the Ukrainian brigades have to fight almost harder with insufficient supplies of important ammunition than against the Russian invaders, they are apparently still capable of a tough and effective defense - often because of a Combination of mines, artillery, anti-tank missiles and drones loaded with explosives, as Ax writes. The Russians have actually failed to carry the fight continuously into the depths over the course of the war so far, explains Brigadier General Björn Schulz in the Bundeswehr podcast
Asked
.
Advantage of Ukraine: They have their eyes and ears everywhere
"That's why it has now come to this point that this direct combat is taking place more and more - artillery preparation of the attack at a relatively short distance, always preparing the attack and then advancing over relatively small gains in space - in our opinion almost paralyzingly slow," he said Commander of the Bundeswehr Armored Forces School explains. Although Schulz says that having to fight the war in one's own homeland is terrible, the Ukrainian defenders are all the better connected as a result; They have their eyes and ears everywhere and always know relatively well where the Russians are currently standing or marching.
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Conversely, the Russians will have their downfall because the Ukrainians at least partially or temporarily own the airspace over the mobile units. In the middle of last year, Ukraine lost several Leopards to a Russian ambush in the Zaporizhzhia region. The
Tagesspiegel
reported at the time that the attacking Ukrainian tank column was traveling without air defense and artillery support and quoted the former soldier and military blogger Thomas Theiner from South Tyrol. “The officers who planned and ordered this attack must be fired,” he demanded. A similar scenario with the same tactical errors will now have taken place on the Russian side.
Putin's offensive: The Russian armed forces are not charging forward, they are crawling
The Russian armed forces are not charging forward, they are crawling - but constantly, writes
Stern
. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also been expecting a Russian offensive for a long time, i.e. a far-reaching operation that will add to the current fighting. On the other hand, the Kremlin was self-confident, 150,000 new soldiers are to be drafted, according to the
Germany editorial network
, and new offensives are expected shortly. The Easter weekend offensive could be seen as a prelude to this.
After Russia had to abandon its original offensive two years ago as a failure early on and survived Ukraine's counter-offensive, Russia is advancing again on various sectors of the front - for example, Robotyne, which was liberated from Ukraine, is once again in its focus. The time for positional battles seems to be over, Russia wants to use force to make up ground - apparently the capture of Avdiivka had failed to achieve the hoped-for gain in prestige, as Deutschlandfunk
suspects
: The capture of Avdiivka was subsequently celebrated in the Russian media as a strategically important victory - perhaps wrongly. “Independent Russian experts like Ruslan Leviyev doubt this; "He is a military observer for the 'Conflict Intelligence Team', a research group that was founded in Russia," as
Deutschlandfunk
writes. The course of the front shows that it has hardly become easier for the Russian army to take the much more important cities under Ukrainian control in the Donets Basin - Kramatorsk and Slovyansk - says Leviev.
Zelensky's successes: "Only individual splashes of color, the overall picture is bleak"
Russia's former President Dmitri Medvedev once again declared the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa and Kiev as war targets on the anniversary. The remaining sectors of the front in the southeast and south of Ukraine also remain hotly contested. The Ukrainian bridgehead near Kynky on the southern bank of the Dnepr River is also under Russian pressure. Apart from scarce material, Ukraine says it would have to throw half a million additional soldiers to the fronts; The defenders are running out of strength, and Russia cannot easily recruit personnel either -
Deutschlandfunk
reports on growing resistance among the Russian population. The war drags on, day in and day out.
Stern
author Gernot Kramper sees the Ukraine war as a whole - with constantly changing disadvantages and advantages for one of the two sides, with no recognizable strategic thread: Time and again, Ukraine achieves spectacular successes. In one week, ships from the Black Sea Fleet were attacked, then a Russian fighter jet crashed after presumably being hit by its own air defenses, now the fiasco of the Russian tank wedge. “But they are only individual splashes of color, the overall picture is bleak.” The Ukrainian troops continue to be under constant pressure from attacking Russian units. The General Staff in Kiev wrote on its Facebook page: “The operational situation in eastern and southern Ukraine remains difficult.”