Can Kasapoğlu
1. Battlefield Assessment
Last week, Moscow’s widening artillery advantage and Kyiv’s stumbling mobilization efforts allowed Russian forces to make significant battlefield advances and tactical gains on multiple fronts. In the meantime, Russian air and missile strikes continued to pound major Ukrainian population centers.
Russian and Ukrainian forces engaged in heavy clashes and positional fighting in Ukraine’s south and east. Open-source intelligence and satellite imagery show that the most intense combat in the east occurred around Bakhmut, Spirne, Avdiivka, and Chasiv Yar. The latter remains under the most intense pressure. In the south, Russia continued to focus on dismantling Ukrainian positions in the Robotyne bulge, Kyiv’s most significant gain from last year’s counteroffensive, and Krynky, the site of Ukraine’s bridgehead across the Dnipro River.
Available indicators also suggest that Russia has been increasing its troop concentrations in Donetsk Oblast at an alarming rate. Russian engineering units, meanwhile, have been working to connect existing trenches with new fortifications extending to Belgorod Oblast in the east and Zaporizhzhia Oblast in the south.
The Kremlin supplemented its ground offensives with drone and missile strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. This week the Ukrainian Air Force reported interception rates of approximately 60 percent against these missile salvos. Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy, meanwhile, revealed that Russian strikes significantly damaged facilities in southern and western Ukraine, including in Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv.
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