Vladimir Putin is set to arrive at his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday with additional leverage: his summer offensive has finally reached momentum. In recent days, Russian forces have breached Ukraine’s defensive line near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, pushing up to ten miles deep into the western sector of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control. The advance, carried out mainly on foot and motorbikes, has yet to crystallise into a full-scale breakthrough, but it ranks among the fastest Russian gains of the past year – and comes at the worst possible moment for Kyiv.
It was not drones, but endless infantry that allowed Russia to penetrate Ukrainian positions this week
The Ukrainian military command denies the reports that Russian human wave assaults have bypassed the recently built fortifications around the village of Zolotyi Kolodiaz and other small settlements close to Dobropillia. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the army chief, repeated his now-routine reassurance, ‘the situation is difficult but under control’, considering that Russia had amassed over 100,000 troops to seize Pokrovsk. The Dnipro operational group, responsible for the eastern front, has called the sudden breach a mapping error:
We must understand that this is not about them taking control of the territory. It’s about a small group of Russians – around 5-10 men – sneaking in. It is absolutely not how it looks on the map.
Yet, for some reason, three brigades – the 92nd, Rubizh and Azov – were pulled out from other sectors of the front to counter the supposed sabotage group holed up in the basement. Several soldiers went public to warn about the deteriorating situation in the Pokrovsk direction, given that Putin is throwing everything he has into the offensive ahead of the Alaska summit. Bohdan Krotevych, former chief of staff of Azov, appealed to Volodymyr Zelensky:
Mr President, I sincerely don’t know what exactly is being reported to you, but I’m informing you: on the Pokrovsk–Kostiantynivka line, without exaggeration, the situation is fucked. And this chaos has been growing for a long time.
During my trip to Ukraine in May, I had a short stop in Dobropillia on my way to Pokrovsk, and even then, moving just twelve miles from one frontline city to another was a deadly lottery. Dobropillia, once home to 28,000 people, has become a military hub full of green-painted trucks and stray dogs, much like other remaining strongholds in the Donetsk region. I set off towards Pokrovsk in the dark to avoid drawing the attention of Russian drones, but halfway there, the soldier driving me hit the brakes: Russia had bombed the building directly ahead of us. It was a weapons warehouse. I reached the front line before first light in one piece, but the same can’t be said for my driver. On his way back to Dobropillia, a Russian glide bomb struck his vehicle. He was badly injured, but miraculously survived.
The warzone looked different from the one I had seen last autumn. Fibre-optic drones, immune to jamming, dominated the skies, and the Russians have used them in overwhelming numbers. When I visited the 25th Sicheslav Brigade stationed near Pokrovsk, their drone unit had just six fibre-optic drones, while the Russians had dozens flying towards us.
Yet it was not drones, but endless infantry that allowed Russia to penetrate Ukrainian positions this week. Ukrainian soldiers often joke that their side of the battlefield is being held by ‘the grandads’ – men in their fifties and sixties getting old in the trenches. Infantry shortages are so severe that a National Guard drone unit I visited was forced to hold empty positions with drones because there were not enough men to fill them. The Russians had more assault troops than Ukraine had drones, allowing them to slip repeatedly behind Ukrainian lines.
With all that said, the Russian breach north of Pokrovsk doesn't come unexpectedly. It is the product of months of accumulated issues in Ukraine’s armed forces, starting from inefficient mobilisation, chronic weapons shortages, chaos in communication between units, misleading reports from the field to senior command and ill-conceived orders to attack for the sake of attacking rather than stabilising the defence. As many soldiers have pointed out, there is also the deeper problem: the absence of a clear strategic vision from Ukraine’s military leadership about what can realistically be achieved on the battlefield. The result is that Russian troops are now tightening the noose around the last fortress cities in the Ukrainian-held quarter of Donbas.
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