![]() ![]() But they are past the point where one defeat would be decisive. Or the Ukrainian attack could fail, of course: this is a war, not a movie. This was where the Ukrainians had their first big victory last September, and although it’s of little strategic or economic importance, it would serve well enough as a demonstration that their army is still making progress. The Ukrainians have been hacking away at the Svatove-Kreminna line for a while already, and it may be ready to crumble. Barring a wholesale collapse of the Russian army, it would not culminate in the reconquest of Crimea, but it would bring Ukrainian forces to the peninsula’s northern border.Īn alternative would be an attack to retake the parts of Luhansk province that were under Ukrainian control until the Russian invasion last February. ![]() The goal would be to cut Russian road and rail links across the Russian-occupied stretch of Ukraine’s south coast and roll up the Russian forces west of there. They will try to take another big bite out of it, and the likeliest choice is Melitopol. systems) to isolate almost any bit of the Russian front from its rear support. ![]() Ukrainian generals have about 1,000 kilometres of front to choose from, and enough artillery now, including 50 HIMARS long-range rocket systems (counting some equivalent non-U.S. It’s just part of the psychological war before the attack. It doesn’t move.” - is merely diversionary. ![]() Talk of the fighting being stalemated, as in Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyryko Budanov’s remarks to the BBC last week - “The situation is just stuck. So, then, where will the next big Ukrainian ground offensive hit? It will definitely happen, because Kyiv feels obliged to show it is making progress in the war in order to keep its western supporters committed. If the “energy offensive” is the worst thing Vladimir Putin’s regime can do to Ukraine’s civilian population, they haven’t got much to worry about. Moreover, most of Ukraine’s power plants are either big dams (practically invulnerable) or nuclear plants (untouchable unless the Russians want fallout on their own territory). The missiles the Russians are using cannot do much damage to big generating stations - and at least 80 per cent of them are now being shot down. Ukraine is so energy-rich that it was selling electricity to Moldova, Belarus and even the European Union in pre-war times. A singe missile strike can never take out all the transformers in a substation, and they are quick and easy to repair. The substations are spread over huge areas and even the individual transformers are widely separated. It was mostly built in Soviet times, and was therefore designed to remain functional even during a full-scale nuclear war. Ukrainian soldiers prepare to fire a French-made CAESAR self-propelled howitzer towards Russian positions in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Dec. These attacks are more a Russian temper tantrum than a strategy, because the Ukrainian electricity supply system is among the least vulnerable in the world. Ukrainian civilian casualties are in single digits most days, and the local power outages rarely last more than half a day. By mid-month it should be reliably quite cold almost all the time: the ground will be hard and the smaller streams will have frozen over.Įxpect the next Ukrainian offensive in late January or early February.ĭo not be distracted by the Russian missiles and drones bombarding Ukrainian cities. It’s still unseasonably warm in Ukraine, but there’s a chance of a hard freeze this weekend. This article was published (298 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Free Press 101: How we practise journalism. ![]()
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