Former chief of employees of the Ukrainian Army’s elite Azov Brigade Lieutenant Colonel Bogdan Krotevich has claimed that Ukrainain forces within the disputed Donbas areas are going through an more and more catastrophic scenario, with Russian items poised to achievetwo main encirclements. “I truthfully don’t know what precisely you’re being instructed, however I can let you know: the Pokrovsk-Konstantinovka line is, with out exaggeration, a whole f**ok up. And this f**ok up has been rising for a very long time, getting messier daily,” he said in an open letter to President Volodymyr Zelensky on August 11. Pokrovsk has been surrounded by Russian forces, whereas Konstantinovka is going through semi-encirclement, he added, sharing a map which he claimed confirmed the scenario within the space, which corroborated media stories of a serious Russian breakthrough to the north of Pokrovsk.
Elaborating on the first points going through Ukrainain frontline items, Krotevich noticed: “The systemic drawback started with the scaling down of reserves, widespread fragmentation of items alongside the whole entrance line, stories a few ‘taken village’ touted as a victory regardless of failures in whole operational instructions.” He added that components of the army management had at instances how a “full lack of a strategic and even operational imaginative and prescient of the theatre of operations.” Stress on Ukrainain forces has mounted following the defeat of an incursion into the Russian Kursk area, which from August 2024 noticed Ukrainian Army and supporting overseas items take super casualties, together with the lack of a lot of its most succesful gear. The retaking of Kursk with important help from North Korean personnel has allowed the Russian Army to reallocate items to different areas of the frontlines.
Studies have mirrored more and more poorly on the state of Ukrainian positions on the frontlines, with a report by the Wall Road Journal in late June noting: “after a chaotic and expensive retreat from Kursk, they discovered outdated trenches, with no overhead cowl from drones. The troopers are actually digging their very own positions underneath drone fireplace in some instances.” The Journal’s warfare correspondents have extra lately slammed the overly inflexible command of the Ukrainian Army, claiming this has resulted in main losses. Ukrainian personnel have been extremely important of the state of their defences, noting that fortifications weren’t nicely suited to battlefields through which drone warfare dominated, and that planners uncared for to make use of mines when there had been alternatives to take action to dam Russian advances.
Ukrainain officers and journalists on the frontlines have from 2023 particularly pressured the unsustainability of the scenario on the frontlines, noting that casualty charges for conscript items reaching 80-90 p.c, which has fuelled a serious personnel disaster. International servicemen and contractors, such because the Polish International Legion and Colombian and Brazilian mercenary items, have performed rising roles to assist compensate for this. The discrepancy in gear, nonetheless, has continued to develop, as Ukraine’s supporters within the Western world have more and more depleted their inventories, whereas Russia has benefitted tremendously each from very giant scale provides from North Korea, and from important will increase within the output of its personal defence sector.
