The five-month wait for the United States Congress to approve $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine may have caused lasting damage that will be felt on the front lines of the war for months to come.
Russian forces took advantage of the “artillery drought” that has plagued Ukraine’s defenses since December to advance on the eastern front near Avdiivka, making the biggest advance since the first months of the war.
Moscow's progress has raised warnings from senior Ukrainian military officers about a possible threat to its troops' supply lines and centers in the east, which are now dangerously close to being within range of Russian firepower.
News of Russia's troop progress comes ahead of a Russian offensive scheduled for late May that could threaten the Ukrainian presence in the Donetsk region and hard-won, if modest, gains toward the occupied port city of Mariupol.
Russia used many resources against the weak Ukrainian defenses on the eastern front lines, advancing towards three key points:
- the vital military center of Pokrovsk, west of Avdiivka
- Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut
- Kurakhove in the southeast
On February 17, Ukraine announced that it had withdrawn from Avdiivka, a city they fought hard for, and which Russia appears to have sacrificed hundreds of soldiers to take.
However, Moscow's advance did not stop there.
In the following 10 weeks, as shown in CNN and an analysis by Ukrainian monitoring group DeepStateMap, Russian forces slowly took village after village west of Avdiivka.
They took advantage of Kiev's failure to build fortifications and did not publicly declare the extent of its territorial losses in the area.
It was only on Sunday (28) that the main Ukrainian military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, admitted the fall of a series of villages, which his subordinates insisted for days were still contested.
The pullback showed that Russian forces had, in just over two months, made the most substantial and rapid progress since the July 2022 advances near Severodonetsk, according to an analysis by the CNN.
Battlefield contradicts Ukrainian speech
Ukrainian reluctance to admit these losses led to public criticism from some pro-Ukrainian bloggers and military analysts.
DeepStateMap, which updates the situation on the front line of the war daily, showed significant losses near Avdiivka.
One of the group's founders, Ruslan Mykula, told CNN which they released because they felt that a “military spokesman has the opportunity to verify the real situation, but he [ainda] provides false information and this undermines our credibility.”
Mykula highlighted that Russian advances near Ocheretyne, a village seized by Russia in recent weeks west of Avdiivka, are “a tactical success so far” but could become “strategic.”
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
