By David Sole
Evidence is mounting that Ukraine is facing a crushing military defeat on the battlefield of the Donbass region. Its desperate plunge into Russia’s Kursk province earlier this month has not yielded any benefit. On the contrary the Kursk incursion is only accelerating Ukraine’s collapse.
Most of the recent 2 years of fighting between Ukraine and the Russian Federation armies has been centered in the Donbass region where Ukraine had controlled about one third of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) since the US-CIA sponsored coup of 2014. A string of towns and villages running roughly north to south had been highly fortified by Ukraine from 2014 up to the Russian Special Military Operation in February 2022.
Two cities became the scene of heavy fighting as a strengthened Russian military began a serious counter offensive in the spring of 2023. Bakhmut fell to Russian forces after months of combat in May 2023. Avdiivka, near the capital city of Donetsk, also saw months of intense fighting ending in that town being taken in February 2024.
Since that time Russian forces have pressed relentlessly westward, taking one village after another. This process has accelerated over the past few months. Ukraine strongholds and logistic hubs of Chasov Yar, Toretsk, Pokrovsk and Vuhledar are either partially occupied by advancing Russian troops or will soon come under overwhelming attack.
West of these key cities are few strong positions and no built-up fortifications. Pokrovsk sits on a main highway from the capital city of Donetsk. It seems likely to fall to the Russians in the coming weeks and, when it does, the road appears clear for rapid advance through the city of Pavlohrad and beyond that, the Dnieper River.
It is not likely that Ukraine can stem this tide. Its numbers are seriously depleted and the Zelensky regime is having trouble filling its battered army’s ranks. Military supplies and ammunition are also in short supply after receiving hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry in order to sustain a proxy war for the United States and NATO with their aim of “weakening Russia.”
Useless Kursk Incursion
Under these conditions Ukraine’s leadership approved a wild adventure – a massive invasion into Russian territory, the Kursk province – on August 6. Most recent reports are that Ukraine took 30,000 reserve troops along with hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles and fought across the very lightly defended Russian border far from the heavy Donbass fighting.
Not surprisingly this surprise attack met with early success in a heavily forested region with tiny settlements and villages. They may have had their sights on capture of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant at the town of Kurchatov further inland. But Russian resistance focused on stopping that plan and has limited Ukraine occupation to an area closer to the border.
The Ukrainian forces in Kursk have generally spread out with relatively small groups of soldiers and a few tanks and armored vehicles. The largest town seized in this thrust is Sudzha which has around 5,000 people. Russian forces, meanwhile, are tracking down Ukrainian pockets and destroying them with Russian superiority in air power and combat drones. The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that they have inflicted over 7,000 casualties and destroyed 74 tanks as well as a large number of other vehicles.
This adventure into Kursk is further depleting a desperately understaffed military with no useful gains for Ukraine. Ukraine’s commander, General Syrskyi, stated that he had hoped Russia would be forced to transfer troops from the Donbass front to Kursk, but this didn’t happen. The large number of Ukraine troops that flowed into Kursk might have made a difference in holding off the Russians in the main fighting theater. Otherwise, the Kursk adventure has become and continues to be a drain on Ukraine’s fighting forces.
The Western media have tried to make it look like a big success or game changer. But even the New York Times had to admit much of the truth in its report of August 23 titled “As Ukraine Pushes Into Russia, Its Next Steps Are Unclear.” The report admits that following a fairly easy border crossing the “Ukrainian forces have pushed out in different directions.” As the Russian military brings in more and more reinforcements, no doubt with the aim of driving the Ukrainians back across the border, it doesn’t look like “Ukraine intends to hold its positions in Russia long term. Ukrainian forces have not been digging the kind of extensive trenches necessary to protect soldiers and equipment from the enemy, if [when] Russia musters enough firepower to repel the attack. They have not been laying minefields…nor have they constructed barriers to slow down Russian tanks.”
The collapse of the Ukrainian forces in the Donbass front, along with the insignificant gain and heavy additional losses in the Kursk area, will inevitably lead to a political crisis for the Zelensky government. Having shown no interest in a negotiated settlement with Russia, and with no approval by the US and NATO country governments to even consider such a course of action, fighting will continue.
This creates a dangerous situation if the neocons in Washington D.C. decide they cannot allow Ukraine to collapse, especially during this election year. This was always a US war with the Ukrainians the bleeding proxies. It was planned for well over a decade. But it is very unlikely that the US or any other NATO nation will be willing to send troops on the ground into combat.
What is more likely is that US/NATO air power may be brought into play in the combat areas to try to stem a disastrous collapse. This would be a very risky escalation and would push Russia to its own round of escalations, with a great probability that fighting would be carried into frontline NATO nations of Romania and Poland.
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