At one point during a grueling 110-day tour in the obliterated frontline Ukrainian city of Toretsk, Dmytro, a soldier with Ukraine’s 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade, listened in to the radio traffic among Russian soldiers.
“We repeatedly heard commanders’ orders to the stormtroopers: ‘Don’t take anyone alive’,” he said in an interview last month in Kramatorsk, about an hour’s drive to the northwest. He spoke on condition only his first name be used. “The fighting here was heavy, as you understand."
As Russia’s all-out invasion grinds into its fourth summer, Ukraine’s beleaguered and exhausted units, like the 100th Brigade, continue to be slowly ground down by a larger army, with more men, more weapons, more ammunition, and a Kremlin determined to force Kyiv capitulate.
Russia has ramped up the pace of operations on the battlefield in recent weeks. Whether that constitutes its anticipated summer offensive, or if that effort is still to come, is an open question.
Either way, Moscow is expected in the coming months to hit a gruesome milestone: 1 million of its own troops killed or wounded. That is well in excess of all casualties suffered by Russia and the Soviet Union in all the conflicts since World War II combined.
The summer offensive is not yet under way, said Ivan Torres, a retired US Army major who is now senior Russian armed forces analyst for Rochan Consulting, a Polish research group.
“The Russians are currently transitioning to the summer campaign season, consolidating recent gains, reconstituting their forces, and bringing up reserve forces and equipment, all while maintaining pressure and offensive momentum,” he said.
“What [the Russians] want by end of the summer offensive is to take all of Donetsk [region]. They’ve made slow incremental advances but with very, very high casualty rates,” said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank.
Sumy
The 1,100-kilometer front line where Ukraine has struggled to hold back Russian forces stretches roughly from the lower reaches of the Dnieper River near the southern city of Kherson to the northeast near the cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, then north to Chasiv Yar and Kupyansk near the Russian border region of Belgorod.
But 300 kilometers northwest of Kupyansk, Russian troops are bearing down on Sumy, a city with a prewar population of 255,000.
Sumy sits on a major highway that runs north to the Russian border and the Kursk region, which Ukraine invaded last August, embarrassing the Kremlin. In late April, Russian troops, bolstered by around 11,000 North Koreans, finally pushed the last Ukrainian units out of Kursk.
In recent weeks, Russian commanders launched a focused, small-scale offensive from the north targeting Sumy. As of July 3, Russian forces were around 20 kilometers outside the city.
Russian officials have justified the push toward Sumy as an effort to create a “deep buffer zone” along the border. Asked about the offensive during a St. Petersburg investment conference in mid-June, President Vladimir Putin issued a thinly veiled threat to seize the city.
“We don’t have a goal to take Sumy. But in principle, I don’t rule it out,” he said.
Days later, on June 26, Ukraine’s top commander claimed that the Russian advance on Sumy had been stopped.
“Based on the results of May and June, we can say that the wave of attempts at a ‘summer offensive’ launched by the enemy from Russian territory has been choked off,” General Oleksandr Syrskiy said. “As of this week, the advance of Russian troops in the border area of the Sumy region has been stopped, and the line of combat contact has been stabilized.”
Sumy “is a supporting effort, though an important one,” Torres said. “It keeps significant Ukrainian forces tied down in a noncritical operational direction while allowing the Russians to gain control of an essential piece of terrain.”
Chasiv Yar
Russian troops have been pushing into the height-of-land Donetsk region city of Chasiv Yar since the spring of 2024 after seizing the larger city of Avdiyivka in February that year.
Ukrainian forces kept Russian soldiers at bay for much of 2024, relying on an irrigation canal as a natural defense. As of this week, however, Russian units occupied around 90 percent of the city, according to the open-source analyst group DeepState.
In recent days, Russian forces have also pushed toward Kostyantynivka from the south, said Viktor Kevlyuk, a reserve Ukrainian army colonel and analyst at the Center for Defense Strategies, a Kyiv think tank.
“The situation is difficult, the enemy has minimal progress, it cannot even achieve tactical success in the area of Chasiv Yar, which would contribute to a breakthrough,” he said in an e-mail.
If Ukraine were to lose Chasiv Yar entirely, it would give Russian forces a height advantage from which to threaten and bombard Kostyantynivka, a railway-and-highway junction city to the southwest. That would both endanger Ukrainian supply lines and threaten the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, which are both major staging locations for Ukrainian forces.
“The Ukrainian problem is a force-to-space problem; they can’t be everywhere at the same time, and the Russians have massively increased drone strikes across all of the eastern front,” Menon said. “They are active in so many areas, the Ukrainians simply can't cover everything.”
Pokrovsk
About 55 kilometers to the southwest of Chasiv Yar is Pokrovsk, another sizable city where the Ukrainians have built formidable defenses. That’s forced Russian troops to push to the south and west, capturing one secondary road at the village of Kotylne.
A larger highway, the E50, runs west from Pokrovsk toward the major city of Dnipro. Losing that road would endanger Pokrovsk. And losing Pokrovsk would put at risk an entire swath of the front line for Ukraine, a stretch of industrial towns and mines that experts call an “agglomeration.”
“The main goal of the summer offensive is the complete occupation of the Donetsk region, that is, the capture of the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration,” Kevlyuk said.
“If I had to name two places which are under attack and which, if the Russians were to take, would be, I don’t know if it would be a game changer, but would really be a serious blow, it would be Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, because Kostyantynivka leaves exposed that large, urban kind of sprawl, from Izyum all the way to Kramatorsk,” Menon said.
“The Russians are far from being able to take them,” he said. “The question is: how long? We have a long time before the summer offensive collapses.”
In his June 28 remarks, Syrskiy, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, also warned of a Russian effort to push northeast of Pokrovsk, toward the town of Dobropillya.
Across Four Julys
As the conflict has stretched into a war of attrition, both Ukraine and Russia have rushed to incorporate new technology and new tactics. While Russian forces have relied heavily on sheer mass and firepower to wear down the Ukrainians, Kyiv has been seen by many experts as more nimble and more innovative, particularly where drones are concerned.
The proliferation of drones, meanwhile, has shifted tactics away from lurching heavy armor toward fast-moving motorcycle units to overwhelm defenses.
For Russia, this is an indication of its own major failures, Menon said: They’ve lost so many tanks and armored personnel carriers to Ukrainian drones and artillery that they’ve given up on large armored attacks and turned to motorcycles and even unarmored passenger vans.
With a larger population, and more lucrative recruiting tactics, Russian commanders have been able to rely on “meat-grinder” tactics: bloody, frontal, infantry assaults that result in huge casualties but overwhelm Ukrainian defenses.
“We talk about drones, motorcycle assaults, new [electronic warfare] systems, enhanced [artificial intelligence] of battlefield command and communications systems, and drones, but they are all part of a larger organic system, the reconnaissance and fire strike complexes,” Torres said.
“It is these approaches to dominating the battlefield through a quick kill chain tied to enhanced sensors to shooter systems, intelligence analysis, and command execution, that have made the Ukrainian battlefield so deadly,” he said. “This is why the battlefield has turned into an attritional grind.”
“Still, Russia has an advantage in personnel and equipment and can retain the initiative and make progress,” he added.
And while Ukraine’s innovations in drone warfare have drawn plaudits, its struggles with manpower and recruitment have not. Despite an overhaul in mobilization laws, and regulations on military service, Ukrainian commanders still struggle to keep many units fully staffed -- not to mention well rested and supplied.
“There is a significant crisis in recruitment, mobilization, training, and equipment allocation in the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” Torres said. “However, even if all these issues were addressed, it would not resolve the larger problem of battlefield mismanagement, poor command and control, ineffective leadership, and a grossly inadequate organizational structure for the Ukrainians.
“Time is working against the Ukrainians,” he said.
Last fall, Ukrainian commanders unveiled major restructuring plans in how their military is organized, moving it away from a brigade structure to a larger corps structure.
“They have very significant problems, but for me what’s remarkable is that they’ve been able to stay in the game,” Menon said.
By RFE/RL
