Another Ukraine government shake-up as defeats continue on the battlefield

By David Sole

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky launched another purge of his top government officials. On September 4 it was reported that he was replacing nine cabinet officials and that a number of top officials had submitted their resignations. These included Foreign Minister Kuleba, Minister of Strategic Industries Kamyshin, Minister of Justice Maliuska among others. As in the past, these top firings come in response to disastrous military setbacks suffered by the Ukrainian military in their proxy war against the Russian Federation.

The news from a broad stretch of the 600-mile-long frontline shows Russian advances and repeated Ukrainian defeats. Heavy fighting in the southern sector of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) marks the battle for Vuhledar. The Ukrainians have held and heavily fortified that town for ten years – ever since the US-CIA coup in 2014. At that time anti-ethnic Russian laws prompted an independence movement to fight back and create the DPR and the neighboring Luhansk People’s Republic. The fall of Vuhledar is expected soon.

Further north, a key military supply center, Pokrovsk, is the target of a major push by Russian forces who are now only a few miles from that city. The BBC, a strong supporter of Ukraine in the war, explained that Pokrovsk was “a crucial logistics hub used by the Ukrainian military. Home to a key railway station and major roads, Pokrovsk is an essential supply and reinforcement point for Ukraine’s troops on the eastern front line….’If we lose Pokrovsk,’ military expert Mykhaylo Zhyrokov warned, ‘ the entire front line will crumble.’”

Ukraine, short of military supplies and lacking replacements for the heavy casualties it has suffered in the past two and a half years of war, is finding it hard to maintain defensive lines. The same BBC report quoted a Ukrainian Member of Parliament, Mariana Bezuhla, who visited the frontline. She reported on Facebook that “The trenches in front of Novohrodivka were empty. There was practically no Ukrainian army in the once 20,000-strong city.”

Ukraine’s top military commander. General Oleksandr Syrsky, admitted to CNN (as reported in Ukrainska Pravda)  that his forces were so depleted that “the dynamics at the front require us to put conscripted servicemen into service as soon as possible.” “Recruits go through a month of basic training, followed by another half-month to a month of more specialist training before being deployed to the front.”

Ukraine attempted to change the equation of the war by diverting tens of thousands of its best troops and hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles into a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk province. Those troops made some quick gains in an area farther north opposite Ukraine’s Sumy region.

But the Ukrainian forces were unable to reach what may have been their main target, the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. Nor did a second goal of this operation succeed which was to force Russia to move troops from the Donetsk frontline thus weakening Russia’s offensive.

Instead, Russia has steadily been bringing in other military units which have kept the Ukrainians bottled up in a broad forested area. The Ukrainians have not established fortified front lines and have been hunted down by Russian missiles, drones and aircraft attacks. The Russian Ministry of Defense estimates that Ukrainian casualties number nearly 10,000 soldiers killed or wounded.

The Kursk gamble may actually be accelerating the defeat of Ukraine’s military.

Meanwhile Ukraine’s air defense systems are virtually exhausted while Russia continues to target Ukraine’s electrical grid and other military targets. On September 3 a military academy in Poltava was destroyed with 51 reported killed and hundreds wounded. The military facility was said to be training cadets in electronic warfare and drone warfare. The instructors are said to have been foreign advisers or mercenaries.

The coming weeks and months may very well see the collapse of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian political structure that has faithfully served the US and NATO imperialist forces since 2014 will inevitably suffer further instability.