Ukraine launches attacks across the front, reclaiming territory
Ukraine has got its anticipated counteroffensive underway, launching small-scale offensives across a wide area to stretch Russian supply lines (June 8-14)
Ukraine recaptured about 100 square kilometres of its territory during the 68th week of the war, its general staff said, carefully executing a counteroffensive months in planning and still in its early days.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the financier of Russia’s Wagner Group of mercenaries, who’ve played a key role in the war, believed that was a slight underestimation.
Russian president Vladimir Putin confirmed the counteroffensive was underway and denied that Ukraine had made any gains.
“It can be stated with absolute certainty that this offensive has begun. This is evidenced by the use of strategic reserves of the Ukrainian army,” he told Ria Novosti in Sochi.
“All counteroffensive attempts made so far have failed,” he said. “But the offensive potential of the troops of the Kyiv regime is still preserved.”
“Counteroffensive and defensive actions are being taken in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a press conference with Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau. “At what stage, I will not disclose in detail.”
The counteroffensive had yet to fully unfold, combat-decorated Commander Demetries Andrew Grimes told Al Jazeera.
“All we’re seeing right now is softening of the [Russian] front lines with harassment fire with everything from small arms and rockets to drones and artillery,” he said.
“The aim of that is to stretch out the opposition to thin their forces… they’re lengthening the conflict zone and forcing the Russians to expose their supply lines so those can be disrupted and [Ukrainian forces] can encircle smaller groups.”
Ukraine has steped up its attacks along almost the entire 1,200 km front. For example, Russia’s defence ministry said it repelled four Ukrainian offensives in the Kreminna area of the eastern Donetsk region on June 9.
Further south, eastern forces spokesman Serhiy Cherevaty said Ukrainian forces advanced by 1,200 metres around Bakhmut that day, and by 1,400 metres the next day. Russian military sources corroborated these advances.
Ukrainian forces also launched a new front where Donetsk meets the Zaporizhia region on June 9. Russia’s defence ministry said initial attacks were repelled, but two days later the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said “geolocated footage and Russian sources indicated that Ukrainian forces liberated multiple settlements… [near] Velyka Novosilka in western Donetsk Oblast.” It is here that Ukraine made most of its territorial gains – 90 square kilometres - said deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar.
A bold offensive
The bravest attack of the counteroffensive may have come in western Zaporizhia, south of Orikhiv, where Russian lines were known to be heavily defended.
Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said a force of 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers with 150 armoured vehicles attempted to break through Russian lines overnight on June 8.
“A preventive strike was delivered by artillery, aviation and anti-tank weapons. In all four directions, the enemy was stopped,” said the Russian defence ministry, reporting Ukrainian losses of 30 tanks and 350 men.
But according to Russian military reporters, the Russian strike was not preventive and a “high intensity battle” took place in which “the enemy fires continuously from artillery and tanks.”
According to them, the Ukrainian assault had initial success. “The second wave by 5 in the morning led the enemy to a small success, they occupied one height,” said one.
“Our soldiers of the heroic company of the 291st regiment, under strong pressure, withdrew from the front line of trenches to reserve positions, the enemy continuously hit these trenches 3 hours before the offensive from all types of weapons,” he reported, but “the 291st regiment repelled all enemy attacks and returned [to] ALL positions.”
On June 12, Russian forces went on the counteroffensive on this front, said Russian military reporters.
Ukraine’s general staff also reported high Russian fatalities – a thousand on June 8 and 900 on June 10.
Transitioning to regular warfare
Ukraine has won media attention for deftly destroying thousands of Russian heavy vehicles throughout the war. The Orikhiv offensive brought it its first negative publicity.
AFP reported that one Ukrainian unit lost six out of nine Bradley Fighting vehicles there.
A separate probe south of Mala Tokmachka also fared badly.
Defence reporter thomas Theiner pointed out that the Mala Tokmachka column had no air support and was vulnerable to being spotted. “Wt least three Russian drones and one helicopter flew above the Ukrainians and walked Russian artillery in,” he wrote on Twitter.
Apparently the blunder happened as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle was damaged, blocking a narrow path that had been cleared of mines, and obstructing advancing heavy armour.
Grimes, who spent two years retraining the Ukrainian military in 2015-2017, told Al Jazeera that these were the teething lessons of a military re-learning to fight regular mechanised warfare after years of successfully using guerrilla tactics.
After Russia’s invasion of the Donbas and annexation of Crimea in 2014, “Ukrainians realised they might not have the resources they need to rebuild their army and navy and air force, and got to work right away building their special operations capabilities, their counter-insurgency capabilities, as well as training a resistance,” said Grimes.
“The navy pretty much transformed into a marine and coastal defence force and their army and other forces basically transitioned into special operations and asymmetric type operationss,” he said.
But this year, Ukraine’s NATO allies provided more than 250 tanks and thousands of armoured vehicles, and retrained nine brigades to fight pitched battles.
“When you transition into conventional warfare you lose some of that asymmetrical advantage,” said Grimes. “With the capabilities of larger military hardware you… have to dedicate forces to defend those assets. It makes you less flexible,” he said.
“Ukraine’s counteroffensive will likely consist of many undertakings of varied size… and the smaller efforts do not represent the maximum capacity of Ukrainian numbers or effectiveness,” said the ISW.
The ISW said Ukraine had prepared 12 offensive brigades and had committed “only a portion of the large reserve forces available” to western Zaporizhia.
“They’re moving carefully, calmly. They lost a couple of Leopards and Bradleys,” said Prigozhin, referring to tanks and armoured fighting vehicles provided by the West. “These are normal combat losses.”
The blown dam benefited Russia
The only region where Ukraine didn’t launch a counteroffensive was Kherson, and that’s because it was flooded by the apparently deliberate destruction of the Kakhovska dam by Russian forces on June 6.
Ukraine’s environment ministry said more than 14 cubic kilometres of water, almost three quarters of the Kakhovska dam’s resevoir, had spilled out, flooding 600 square kilometres of Kherson.
That was a defensive tactic, said Ukrainian Deputy defence minister Lt. Oleksandr Pavlyuk. “I think the enemy wanted to ensure the security of their left flank. Having blown up the dam, they created a barrier line and thereby prevented our offensive from this side,” he said.
Grimes agreed. “You limit where the Ukrainians can operate, forcing them into the dry areas… where they’re exposed,” he told Al jazeera. “Also you impact some of the infrastructure that limits some of their ability to resupply some of their units that may be trapped on higher ground.”
This, said Grimes, was a tactic Russian forces learned from Ukraine.
“[In the early weeks of the war] the Ukrainians on the outskirts of Kyiv flooded a lot of the fields with water so that they forced the Russians’ heavy armour and trucks to manoeuvre on higher and more solid ground and targeted them more effectively,” he said.
Reports surfaced in April that Ukrainian forces were infiltrating a poorly defended part of the riverine coast of Kherson, the southern region bisected by the Dnipro river. Russian military reporters placed Ukrainian advance units 7km southwest of Kherson city, on the left bank of the Antonovsky bridge, and on some of the islands in the nearby Dnipro delta.
The Russian goal was evidently to flush them out and prevent further deployments, but it also backfired.
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said Russia was redeploying elements of the 49th Combined Arms Army away from Kherson.
Ukraine’s southern forces spokesperson Natalia Humenyuk said flooding had obliged Russian forces to withdraw by 5-15 kilometres from their forward positions, leaving behind equipment. As a result, Russian shelling had almost halved.
The flooding may have caused another Russian own-goal: minefields had been washed away, Humenyuk said, and mines were being found in the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s general staff said the flooding had not only caused losses of equipment but of manpower.
“In the units of the 7th Assault Division and the 22nd Army Corps of the Russian Federation there are injured, killed and missing. Also, several field warehouses with ammunition and provision, automobile and armored equipment, other military property were lost in the said units,” said the staff.
Russian forces, too, had to abandon the Dnipro Delta.
Ukraine’s military intelligence cited Russian “blogger-collaborator” Oleksandr Talipov’s report that Russian soldiers on the Dnipro delta islands were evacuated before the flood from the destroyed Kakhovska dam reached them, as evidence that the act was pre-meditated.
Still, Russian forces were apparently adopting the tactic elsewhere.
Ukraine’s Military Media Centre said Russian forces had blown another dam, at the village of Novodarivka in Zaporizhia, flooding an area on the banks of the Mokri Yala river.
And Ukrainian Major Vladyslav Dudar said Russian forces were regularly blowing up small dams to disrupt Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.
Despite the setback in Kherson, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was satisfied with progress in the other three regions.
“The battles are fierce, but we are moving forward, and this is very important. The enemy's losses are exactly what we need,” said Zelenskyy in a video address.
NOTE: Hellenica monitors the Ukraine war due to its security implications for Europe as a whole.