Can Kasapoğlu
Battlefield Assessment
This week, Russia’s offensive continued to focus on eastern and northeastern Ukraine. Russian combat formations pummeled the Kharkiv front and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and mounted a smaller attack in southern Ukraine. In Donetsk and Luhansk, positional fighting persisted. Moscow achieved marginal territorial gains around important contested towns such as Chasiv Yar and areas adjacent to Avdiivka, a city already occupied by Russian forces.
Open-source intelligence indicates that Russian and Ukrainian drones have saturated the airspace over Kharkiv, constantly tracking the city and its surrounding environs. Reports suggest that Ukraine’s drone presence is pushing Russian troops to adopt alternative concepts of operations (CONOPS) using smaller armored vehicles, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles rather than bulkier main battle tanks supporting large combat formations. This adjustment is slowing Russia’s offensive by dispersing its troop concentrations and reducing its effectiveness in mechanized warfare.
Yet Russia is sending waves of glide bombs and missiles to wreak destruction on Kharkiv. While Russia’s strikes have produced only incremental advances and minimal territorial changes, these salvos often hit the city’s civilian population, in an echo of the Kremlin’s massacres in the restive Chechnya during the 1990s.
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