Nearly 3,000 Putin soldiers risk being surrounded by kyiv’s army in Glushkovo

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 21, 2024, p. 26

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 strike a blow, 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 battle 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 53,000 inhabitants), which is considered an important logistical hub in the Donetsk area under Ukrainian control.

According to data collected by the Ukrainian Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) project DeepState, while the intensity of the fighting in the southern, Bakhmut and Svatovo (Luhansk) directions has decreased or it has stopped in Kharkiv, the Russian army has occupied the settlements of Nikolaevka, Zhelannoye, Orlovka, Lisichnoye, Ivanovka, Zalizne and Spiridonovka last week, a total of 80 square kilometers, of which almost 59 are in the vicinity of Pokrovsk.

Russian troops are about 10 kilometers from Pokrovsk, a distance that prompted the head of the Donetsk military administration (equivalent to the governor of the territory under Ukrainian control), Vadym Filashkin, to say last Monday that the front (of battles) is too close and order the evacuation of families with minor children (about 4 thousand 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 Ministry of Defense reported yesterday that New York (until 2021, Novgorodskoye, in the Bakhmut district) is already under complete 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 Ukrainian line of defence, the Russian army must first take Pokrovsk and Toretsk, and then focus its offensive on 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 the Russian Kursk region yesterday, nearly 3,000 Russian soldiers risk being surrounded by Ukrainian troops in the Glushkovo district, attacked from three sides, without being able to receive any supplies.

Destroyed, presumably by Ukrainian air strikes and US missiles Himarsthe three bridges that were over the Seim River, there are 2 kilometers 600 meters left for the Ukrainian units to close this kind of trap that would trap the Russian troops between the Seim and the border with the Ukrainian region of Sumy, believes the expert Yan Matveyev, who concludes that Russia He lacks the tools to reverse the situation there: either he 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 structures of this type in the Glushkovo area, one of which was destroyed yesterday) or, at the very least, swimming across the river under fire from drones and artillery.

Speaking to delegates of the congress of regional and local authorities via video conference yesterday, Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said that 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, since August 6, when Ukrainian troops crossed the border, has launched 44,500 projectiles per 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.