Russian and Ukrainian troops advance in Donetsk and Kursk border regions

Moscow. According to information available from both sides, in the last three days both the Russians, in Donetsk (Ukraine), and the Ukrainians, in Kursk (Russia), reported advances of their troops in the order of one or two kilometers per day, the apparent objective of both being to carry out a coup, since everything indicates that they are trying to cut off the enemy’s supply routes of food, ammunition, military equipment and reinforcement units, although this is a very localized sector of the extensive combat front.

This is how military analysts interpret the fact that, instead of moving more troops from Donetsk and Lugansk to Kursk and other Russian border regions, the Russian Army General Staff decided to concentrate the majority of the attacks in one place, around the city of Pokrovsk (currently with 53 thousand inhabitants), which is considered an important logistical hub in the Donetsk area under Ukrainian control.

According to data collected by the Ukrainian DeepStateOSINT (Open Source Intelligence) project, while the military activity decreased in intensity in the Southern, Bakhmut and Svatovo (Luhansk) directions or stopped in Kharkiv, the Russian army occupied last week the towns of Nikolayevka, Zhelannoye, Orlovka, Lisichnoye, Ivanovka, Zalizne and Spiridonovka, a total of 80 square kilometers, of which almost 59 square kilometers are in the vicinity of Pokrovsk.

Russian troops are about 10 kilometers from Pokrovsk, a distance that prompted the head of the military administration of Donetsk (equivalent to the governor of the territory under Ukrainian control), Vadym Filashkin, to say last Monday that “the front (of combat) is too close” and order the evacuation of families with minor children (about 4,000 children), while Sergiy Dobryak, acting mayor of Pokrovsk, warned its inhabitants that they have “one or two weeks at most” to leave the city and urged them to do so while it is still possible.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that New York (until 2021, Novgorodskoye, Bakhmut district) is “already under full control” of its troops, although the Ukrainian side claims that its fighters still hold about 20 percent of the town. New York, named after its 18th-century founders, a group of Mennonites who came to the Tsarist empire under Catherine the Great, is part of the Toretsk urban agglomeration, 50 kilometers from Pokrovsk.

To reach the next line of Ukrainian defense, the Russian army has to take first Pokrovsk and Toretsk, to focus their offensive towards Konstantinovka, already in the Kramatorsk district, which together with Sloviansk are the Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk.

And on the other side of the border, two weeks after Ukrainian troops invaded Russia’s Kursk region on Tuesday, nearly three thousand Russian soldiers risk being surrounded by Ukrainian troops in the Glushkovo district, attacked from three sides and unable to receive any supplies.

Destroyed, presumably by Ukrainian air strikes and US missiles Himarsthe three bridges over the Seim River, are 2 kilometers 600 meters away from the Ukrainian units to close this sort of trap that would catch the Russian troops between the Seim and the border with the Ukrainian region of Sumy, believes the expert Yan Matveyev, who concludes that Russia “lacks the instruments to reverse the situation there: either it withdraws or sends more soldiers who, sooner or later, will be condemned to die or be taken prisoner.”

According to military analyst Yuri Fyodorov, if the circle closes, the only way for the Russian soldiers to withdraw will be via pontoons (based on satellite images, experts speak of two or three improvised constructions of this type in the Glushkovo area, one of which was destroyed on Tuesday) or, at the very least, swimming across the river under fire from drones and artillery.

Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, speaking via video conference to delegates at a congress of regional and local authorities on Tuesday, said his army controls 93 Russian towns and an area of ​​1,263 square kilometers.

Syrskyi showed for the first time – a fragment widely disseminated by Ukrainian television and news agencies – a map of the “occupied Russian territory” and revealed that Russia, starting on August 6 when Ukrainian troops crossed the border, launches 44,500 projectiles a day, three times more than Ukraine (14,600).

According to the general, since February 2022, Ukraine has been able to intercept one in four of the nearly 10,000 missiles fired by Russia. And of the 14,000 drones used as bombs, Ukraine’s air defense system has shot down 9,200.