*** MILITARY SITUATION ***
The euphoria that accompanied Ukraine’s unforeseen early victories against bumbling Russian troops is fading as Moscow adapts its tactics, recovers its stride and asserts its overwhelming firepower against heavily outgunned Ukrainian forces. Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight. The Ukrainians are still fighting back, but they are running out of ammunition and suffering casualties at a far higher rate than in the initial stages of the war. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured.
In a cafe in the front-line town of Slovyansk, two Ukrainian soldiers on a break from the trenches nearby recounted how they were forced to retreat from the town of Dovhenke, northwest of Slovyansk, under withering Russian artillery fire. Thirty-five of their 100-strong unit were killed in the assault, typical of the tactics Russia is using. “They destroy everything and walk in,” said one of the soldiers, Vitaliy Martsyv, 41. “There is nothing there,” Andriy Tihonenko, 52, said of Dovhenke. “It’s all burned down.” As troop fatalities mounted, the surviving soldiers felt “more motivated to hold our position,” Tihonenko said. To retreat after their comrades were killed defending the town, he said, would have felt like treating their deaths as insignificant. But eventually, the defensive line was no longer effective, the two men said. With more than one-third of their force killed, the remaining soldiers had no choice but to pull back.
“The Russians are using long-range artillery against us, often without any response, because we don’t have the means,” he said. “They can attack from dozens of kilometers away and we can’t fire back. We know all the coordinates for all their important targets, but we don’t have the means to attack.”
Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said. Ukraine urgently needs to shift to longer-range and more sophisticated Western systems, but those have only recently been committed, and in insufficient quantities to match Russia’s immense firepower, he said. Russia is firing as many as 50,000 artillery rounds a day into Ukrainian positions, and the Ukrainians can hit back with only around 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day, he said. The United States has committed to deliver 220,000 rounds of ammunition — enough to match Russian firepower for around four days.
The majority of the American M777 howitzer artillery guns that U.S. officials said would enable Ukraine to match Russian firepower are now in use on the battlefield, according to the Pentagon. Yet the Russians continue to advance.
Four of the more sophisticated and longer-range HIMARS multiple-rocket launcher systems that the Ukrainians had long requested from the United States are on the way, along with three similar systems pledged by Britain. But the Ukrainians will first have to be trained how to use them, and they are still weeks away from reaching the battlefield, U.S. officials say. The Pentagon has hinted that more systems will be made available once the Ukrainians have demonstrated they can be used.
The Russians started the war with about 900 of their own similar systems, and although the Ukrainians claim they have destroyed hundreds, the Russians still have hundreds left, Danylyuk said. The Russians have meanwhile adapted their tactics in ways that have let them take full advantage of their firepower by remaining at a distance from Ukrainian positions, pounding them relentlessly, then taking territory once the Ukrainians have been forced to retreat.
The Russians are also doing a better job of combining their arms, using close air support and deploying dismounted infantry, said Rob Lee, a former U.S. Marine now with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Russia has regenerated its forces to a greater extent than anticipated by many military analysts, bolstering its depleted army by as many as 40,000 to 50,000 men over the past two months, by increasing the age of the reserve force, deploying new forces and refurbishing units that had been decimated, Danylyuk said.
-Russian forces fired cruise missiles to destroy a large depot containing US and European weapons in western Ukraine’s Ternopil region, Interfax reported on Sunday, as street fighting raged in the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk.
-Ukraine is using 5,000 to 6,000 artillery rounds a day, according to Skibitsky. “We have almost used up all of our artillery ammunition and are now using 155-calibre Nato standard shells,” he said of the ammunition that is fired from artillery pieces. “Europe is also delivering lower-calibre shells [122mm] but as Europe runs out, the amount is getting smaller.”
-Ukraine says it is almost out of 152mm artillery shells. That sounds plausible, but that has been floated as true since April so who knows if it’s really the case. Ukraine also says it is consuming over 5000 shells a day. That contradicts its earlier claim in a joint report by Ukrainian and Western intelligence that Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is 40 times smaller than Russia’s. If Ukraine is firing 5000 shells daily then Russia would have to be firing 200,000 shells daily — which is impossible. (A shell like that weighs 50 kg. Just 20 of them weigh a ton.) Both of these things can not be true at the same time.
It increasingly sounds like everything Ukraine says is in the service of extracting more support from the West. The claim that the Russians now have 10 to 15 times more artillery pieces could be an interesting one. One that could tell us something about Ukrainian artillery losses so far. Sadly that estimate can not be trusted because the Ukrainians would be saying that whether they thought it was true or not. Just as they claim to be going through 5000 shells daily and the Russian 40X that.
-Ukraine is in control of Azot factory in Sievierodonetsk, the governor of the Luhansk region said after a Russia-backed separatist claimed that between 300 and 400 Ukrainian fighters were trapped there. About 800 people, including children, are hiding beneath a chemical factory in the key eastern Ukrainian city, now 80% held by Russian troops.
-Russian air defence forces have shot down three Ukrainian war planes, according to the country’s defence ministry. It said the military had shot down two MiG-29 planes in the Mikolayiv region and one Su-25 fighter jet in the Kharkiv region.
-Russian strikes knocked out power supplies in Donetsk’s two largest Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on the Telegram app. Speaking later on national television, he said the move was part of a deliberate strategy to cut off electricity in towns in Donetsk that remain in Ukrainian hands, Reuters reports.