theguardian | After several weeks of deadlock, Russia’s military appears to have found a way to advance in the Donbas – pounding it with such intense, unsophisticated artillery that Ukraine’s exhausted defenders are having to yield.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy rarely gives casualty figures but Ukraine’s president said last Sunday that “50 to 100 Ukrainian troops die on Donbas frontlines each day”, meaning perhaps 3,000 a month in the grisly war of attrition.
Wounded will typically be three or perhaps four times as much, a serious loss for a Donbas defence force estimated at 30,000 before the war began, although the numbers increased following Ukraine’s mass mobilisation.
“Russian forces have secured more terrain in the past week than efforts earlier in May,” reported the Institute for the Study of War on Tuesday, in particular approaching the frontline city of Sievierodonetsk and in villages nearby.
“The shelling of Sievierodonetsk is growing exponentially,” said Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, which is now 95% controlled by the Russians. He estimated 10,000 Russian troops and an extra 2,500 pieces of equipment had been committed to the attack.
The Russian advances are not dramatic but they reflect a new strategy. Gone for now are the attempts at wider encirclements of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, which included a failed river crossing in early May. Instead units are focused on smaller encirclements – or “cauldrons” – and a sheer concentration at Sievierodonetsk.
That was confirmed by the militia head of the self-proclaimed pro-Russian republic in Donetsk, Eduard Basurin, who said Russian forces had adopted an approach of creating smaller encirclements to deprive Ukrainian troops of logistics and reinforcements, rather than pursuing a single large one.
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