The writer has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia
Along the southern reaches of the Dnieper River, Ukrainian forces are staging amphibious assaults on Russian positions across the river from around the city of Kherson, forcing Russia to deploy already-stretched units to prevent Ukraine from gaining a foothold on the eastern bank.
Nearly 1,000 miles to the north, it is the Russians who are on the offensive and forming what the Ukrainian military called a “striking fist,” with tens of thousands of soldiers amassed near the towns of Kupiansk and Kreminna. That has prompted Ukraine to dispatch some of its most seasoned airborne assault units to retake positions lost this summer.
On a front line that cuts a jagged path roughly the same distance as from New York to Miami, the fighting rarely relents.
And with Ukrainian forces pressing ahead along multiple lines of attack — Kyiv’s most ambitious and high-stakes offensive campaign in nearly a year — what happens in one sector invariably affects the others.
“A person who simply reads the news does not see it, does not feel it,” Hanna Maliar, a deputy Ukrainian defence minister, said this week. It can seem that everything is taking a long time, “but believe me, it doesn’t seem that way to people who are fighting,” she said.
“In fact, this is a very dynamic, active process,’’ she said.
To better understand how the fight is playing out along the breadth of the front, it is useful to look at some of the major theaters where Russia and Ukraine have concentrated their troops. Moving geographically from the northeast to the south, this is a snapshot of the fighting as summer draws to a close.
After Ukraine drove Russian forces from nearly all of the Kharkiv region last fall, its offensive was finally halted in the pine forests that dominate the landscape there.
This sector stretches some 60 miles through towns such as Kupiansk and Kreminna, and has been the scene of seesaw battles for months. One army moves a mile or two forward, only to be driven back again.
That’s a common sequence in this war; what’s different in the northeast, the Ukrainians acknowledge, is that it is one of the very few places where Russia’s forces are engaged in sustained offensive operations, and making small, tactical gains.
So far the Russians have failed to break the Ukrainian lines, according to military analysts and soldiers interviewed over the summer. Still, there is no indication that Russian pressure will ease. Ukraine warned last week that Moscow had withdrawn ground forces from Belarus to join offensive operations in the area.
Russia claimed victory over the smoldering rubble of Bakhmut in May after a yearlong campaign that featured some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. The city was razed, but the battle never stopped.
Almost immediately, Ukrainian forces began fighting to drive the Russians from areas to the north and south of Bakhmut. The gains can appear small — a few hundred yards in a given clash — but the Ukrainians have continued to advance, slowly but steadily.
On a recent visit to Ukrainian positions around the city, soldiers said they knew they were not the focus of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, with much of the best weaponry and personnel being deployed in the south. But they aid the war effort by forcing the Russians to devote resources to the defense of Bakhmut.
Maliar said on Monday that Ukraine had reclaimed about 19 square miles around the city.
The fighting has been brutal, with attacks and counterattacks by both sides. For months, Ukraine has gradually progressed south of the city, in and around the village of Klischivka. And it has launched a series of coordinated attacks this week, according to military officials and combat footage geolocated by military analysts.
At the same time, battles rarely cease around the towns of Avdiivka and Marinka to the south of Bakhmut, with Ukraine now hoping to exploit any gaps in the defense that emerge as Russian forces are increasingly stretched.
The Ukrainian military continued the crawl forward on the eastern front, retaking control of part of the settlement of Opytne, which lies to the south of Avdiivka, Maliar said.
While Bakhmut has drawn more attention for the ferocity of the battles there, the coal mining town of Vuhledar has been the site of fierce, destructive fighting. It is where the eastern and southern fronts converge, only a few miles from vital Russian logistical lines that supply Russian troops in southern Ukraine, making it a critical corner of the war.
The Russians have been shelling Vuhledar for months. Drone footage shot over blasted-out ruins by The New York Times highlights the intensity of the fighting.
Ukrainian soldiers in this area say their primary mission is to hold on to key positions and, if the opportunity presents itself, take advantage of stretched Russian forces to gain better positions to strike a vital Russian logistical hub 17 miles to the southeast, in Volnovakha.
After a faltering start marked by heavy losses, Ukraine has regrouped and adjusted its tactics. Its forces have broken through what they consider to be the first line of Russian defenses along two lines of attack heading south.
One of those thrusts has retaken the village of Robotyne; though tiny, it represented the most important advance of the counteroffensive to date. Ukraine had pushed through Russia’s first major layer of defenses and set up a base for launching further advances to the south.
The Ukrainian military said Sunday that it had reclaimed an additional 1.5 square kilometres — less than 1 square mile — around Robotyne. By expanding their bridgehead there, Ukrainian forces hope to reduce pressure on their logistical operations, allowing them to intensify their attacks around the village of Verbove, about 9 miles to the east. - The New York Times
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