Russians press assaults along front line in the east
Russian forces have intensified attacks in recent days, targeting a string of towns along an eastern stretch of the front line even as they defend against a Ukrainian offensive in the south. Their movements add to the sense of inconclusive, back- and-forth fighting that has characterized front-line combat for weeks, with few territorial gains.
Ukraine's military said Wednesday that it had repelled tank attacks supported by artillery in one of Russia's heaviest assaults in months on the city of Avdiivka, and that Russia had over the past 24 hours dropped 20 powerful aviation bombs near the cities of Lyman and Kupiansk, all in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian commanders had since last month cautioned that Russia was marshaling troops in the east for a renewed attempt to break through Ukrainian lines. The area was a focus of a Russian offensive last winter that largely failed.
“Our Avdiivka is under massive attacks by Russian artillery and aviation,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president's office, said Tuesday in a post on the Telegram messaging service, which included a photo of a building reduced to rubble.
Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian government research group, said in an interview that “the scale of the recent attacks is unprecedented” in Avdiivka. He compared it to the fighting that took place there more than half a year ago, when Russia relentlessly shelled the town during its winter offensive.
Russia's attempts to advance this year have mostly taken place along Ukraine's eastern front line, where Moscow is trying to capture Ukrainian territory in two provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk, that it has claimed to have annexed but that it does not fully control. Other eastern towns targeted by Russia include Bakhmut, which Wagner's mercenaries captured in May.
Ukrainian forces have retaken several strategic villages in the east.
Still, Russian forces appeared to have deployed significant effort in manpower and weaponry in its push to close in on Avdiivka and Kupiansk.
Ilya Yevlas, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian army in the east, told Ukrainian television Wednesday that Russia had amassed troops to assault Kupiansk from the east, with an intermediary goal of pushing Ukraine's forces from the eastern bank of the Oskil River. Kupiansk is on the river's western bank.
Even if they accomplished that, military analysts have said, a crossriver assault on the town is unlikely, in part because success would position Russian forces poorly for an extended fight in the area. They would need to defend a bridgehead on the western bank that would have to be resupplied over the river under fire.
Ukraine's top military command said Tuesday that up to three Russian battalions had launched a ground assault on Avdiivka, supported by tanks and armored vehicles.
A Russian military blogger who has closely tracked the war from the Russian perspective, Rybar, posted on Telegram that Russian forces had broken through Ukrainian defenses near villages outside Avdiivka in a maneuver seeking to surround the town. His claims could not be independently verified.
Meanwhile, for the first time, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined a meeting of more than 50 defense leaders from around the world Wednesday to make a personal pitch for military aid, in the face of lagging political support in the U.S. and new pressure on allies to send weapons to bolster Israel's war with Hamas.
His presence underscored growing concerns about cracks in what has been staunch international backing for Kyiv in its war against Russia's invasion, and worries that Ukrainian forces haven't made measurable progress in the counteroffensive as winter closes in.