Luhansk has almost fallen, as Russia approaches a new milestone in the east
Russia is using the excuse of buffer zones to push deeper into Ukraine while attending peace talks
The Russian occupation governor of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region claimed it had been entirely conquered on Tuesday [July 1], making it the first of the four eastern Ukrainian regions Russia has annexed that it fully controls.
“Just a couple of days ago, I received a report that the territory of the Luhansk People’s Republic has been 100% liberated,” Leonid Pasechnik told Russia’s TV Channel One.
Not everyone agreed. Russian military reporters said two villages remained free, and pointed out that Luhansk had been declared conquered once before, in 2022, before being partially reclaimed in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in September of that year.
Undoubtedly, though, Russian forces have inched towards reconquering the entire territory in the intervening 33 months, and that constitutes a second milestone within the past month on Ukraine’s eastern front.
Russian troops reached the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region over the weekend of June 7-8, marking the first time in the war they had conquered the entire breadth of the Donetsk region at any point, even though about a third of it still remains in Kyiv’s hands.
These milestones may be strategically meaningless, as they do not mark a breakthrough or a pace change in Russian forces’ crawling advance, but they do demonstrate that Ukrainian forces are also unable to turn the tide.
The Russian defence ministry claimed its forces had taken the villages of Zaporozhye, Perebudova, Shevchenko, and Yalta in Donetsk on June 27, proceeding to Chervonaya Zirka the following day and Novoukrainka on Sunday.
Through such small but constant conquests, Russia has given its offensive in Ukraine an inexorable feeling.
The buffer bluff
“Naturally, the Russian armed forces are now tasked to continue operations to establish a buffer zone. According to experts, it should stretch at least 70 to 120 kilometers deep inside Ukraine,” Igor Korotchenko, editor of National Defense magazine told Kremlin newswire TASS.
Such statements have come before from Russian officials and pro-Moscow pundits.
Last March, when Russian forces recaptured Kursk, a Russian region Ukraine had counter-invaded, battalion deputy commander Oleg Ivanov told TASS it was now necessary to create a buffer zone “no less than 20 kilometers wide, and preferably 30 kilometers, extending deep into Ukrainian territory,” so that residents of Kursk would be safe from Ukrainian counterattack.
In May, deputy chairman of Russia’s National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that “If military aid to the regime of bandits continues,” referring to Kyiv, “the buffer zone could look like this” – and he posted a map on his Telegram channel, showing almost all of Ukraine shaded.
When Russian troops reached the Dnipropetrovsk border last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said they had begun new offensive operations in that region “within the framework of the creation of a buffer zone”.
Officially, the Kremlin has annexed only Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, but given that Russian president Vladimir Putin on June 20 revealed he still regarded all of Ukraine as Russian territory, many experts believe these buffer zones are little more than an excuse to continue capturing as much Ukrainian territory as possible.
On June 27 Putin referred to his goals more cryptically, telling journalists at the Eurasian Economic Union summit in Minsk that “we want to conclude the special military operation with the result that we need.”
In May he called for a buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine on Ukrainian territory, leaving it to his lieutenants to define it. One general thought it should comprise six Ukrainian territories, and legislators in the Russian Duma backed him.
Putin has always referred to his war in Ukraine as a “special military operation”.
On Sunday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.
The move would allow Ukraine to manufacture, stockpile and use such mines to defend itself.
“Antipersonnel mines … very often have no alternative as a tool for defence,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine strikes back
Ukraine continued to score tactical successes of its own inside Russia, using long-range weapons.
On Friday and Saturday [June 27-28], Ukrainian drones struck the Kirovske airfield. The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) said it was behind the attack and claimed to have destroyed at least three attack helicopters.
Also last week, Ukraine’s General staff said an aerial attack had destroyed at least four Sukhoi-34 fighters at Russia’s Marinovka airbase. Russia uses the fighters to drop glide bombs on Ukrainian frontlines.
Intelligence sources reported that Ukraine may have destroyed a Russian intelligence base in the Bryansk region on June 26.
“Russia is investing in its unmanned capabilities, Russia is planning to increase the number of drones used in strikes against our state,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday [June 30].
The previous day, Russia had conducted the largest unmanned airstrike of the war so far, sending 447 drones and 90 missiles into Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine’s Air Force said it had shot down or electronically suppressed all but one of the drones and 38 missiles.
The increase in scale and intensity of Russian unmanned air attacks this year, and particularly since bilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine resumed in May, has led Ukrainian military experts to conclude that Russia is marking Ukrainian territory it intends to launcha ground war against.
“We are not talking about the front lines. We are talking actually about [rear] areas and even the residential areas of Ukraine, so not so-called red line cities or communities but actually yellow cities and communities, which means slightly farther from the red line zones,” Cambridge University Centre for Geopolitics expert Victoria Vdovychenko told Al Jazeera.
When Zelenskyy spoke on Monday, German foreign minister Johann Wadephul visited Kyiv for the first time.
Zelenskyy said most of the €9bn in military aid Germany has promised this year would go towards the “strategic objective” of launching “systematic production of air defense systems.”
He had elaborated on what that meant last week, when he said he was “scaling up Ukraine’s potential, particularly regarding interceptors,” the missiles used to intercept incoming missiles.
“The scale of our production and the pace of drone development must be fully aligned with the conditions of the war,” he said. Russian attacks have been increasing in scale, and Zelenskyy meant that Ukraine had to keep up in its defensive response.
Regarding drones, he said on Monday, “the priority is drones, interceptor drones and long-range strike drones.”