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Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from parts of a long-fought eastern city, highlighting the challenge facing Kyiv’s troops as Russia intensifies its offensive and US military aid is slow to arrive.
Russia’s army has been focused on the hilltop city of Chasiv Yar since capturing Avdiivka, an industrial city further south, in February. Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of troops around Chasiv Yar in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed to have annexed along with three other regions that are only under his army’s partial control.
Ukrainian officials said holding part of Chasiv Yar “became impractical”. They ordered the retreat from a neighbourhood across a canal “after the enemy entered it, because it threatened the lives and health of our servicemen and the positions of our defenders were destroyed”, said Ukrainian military spokesperson Nazar Voloshyn on Thursday.
Russia still holds advantages in manpower and artillery but new US military assistance packages worth billions of dollars that include heavy artillery and air defence systems are beginning to arrive at the frontline after a six-month delay due to Republicans in Congress earlier this year.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Bloomberg this week that as many as 14 brigades were undersupplied or without weapons entirely because American military aid was arriving too slowly.
Once home to 12,000 residents — fewer than 600 remain hunkered in basements under constant attack — Chasiv Yar sits atop strategic high ground. Just beyond are the critically important cities of Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Pokrovsk, all of which are coming under heavy and steady Russian missile and artillery attacks and would be threatened with occupation themselves if the Kremlin’s troops manage to get over the hump in Chasiv Yar.
Aerial photographs and videos published by Ukrainian military units defending the city showed apartment buildings, businesses and a church flattened after months of fighting. Voloshyn said that Russia had pounded the city with hundreds of bombs and shells each day.
“The command decided to pull back to more protected and prepared positions, but even there the enemy does not stop its active combat actions,” the spokesperson added.
Ukraine’s military and Russian military analysts have said that Moscow’s forces have taken heavy casualties — probably in the many thousands, by Kyiv’s and analysts’ counts — in their attempt to capture Chasiv Yar. As with the battle of Bakhmut, which Russia occupied last year after gruelling months of fighting, and which sits just four miles west, Russian commanders have employed “meat wave” tactics, where they send infantry troops in small groups one after the other to assault Ukrainian positions.
The Russians have recently been using motorcycles, dirt bikes, four-wheelers and dune buggies to storm Ukrainian trenches, according to soldiers on the frontline. They are also deploying drones to scout and attack Ukrainian positions and highly destructive “glide bombs” that leave craters 20m wide and 6m deep.
Moscow’s troops are closing in on the city, attacking several surrounding towns and villages.
Deep State, a Ukrainian analytical group with ties to the defence ministry, said Russia was trying to break through at several points along the 600-mile frontline, forcing Kyiv’s troops to respond to several hotspots simultaneously.
“If the enemy can expand its bridgehead in the . . . area, it will be able to threaten Chasiv Yar from the south,” the Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS), a Ukrainian security think-tank, wrote on Wednesday.
Russian forces have also occupied two new villages in Donetsk region while expanding the front in Kharkiv region with an incursion into the village of Sotnytskyi Kozachok.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Ukraine faced a difficult summer in a grinding fight over the Donetsk region. “The lines in Kharkiv have stabilised but the added front stretched Ukrainian manpower thin, even as mobilisation ramps up and the west seeks to address Ukraine’s critical shortage of air defence.”
The CDS also said that Russian forces were conducting “sabotage and reconnaissance operations” across the border in nearby Sumy and Chernihiv regions.
Russia conducted similar probing missions in northern Kharkiv region in May, before Moscow ordered a new offensive there with 30,000 soldiers and occupied several more towns and villages while bringing Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, within range of larger and more devastating weapons.
Pro-Kremlin military bloggers with close ties to the army confirmed that Russian forces were concentrating new assaults on the cities of Niu-York and nearby Toretsk. Deep State, which tracks changes along the frontline, showed advances towards both locations on its map on Thursday.
“[Ukraine’s] defence is cracking,” said Yuriy Podolyaka, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in absentia for collaborating with Russia.
Ukraine’s General Staff, however, insisted that the line was holding.
“The situation looks better than it did a few months ago, but Ukraine’s priority remains to hold Russia to incremental gains and avoid any significant breakthrough,” Kofman said.
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