Ukraine puts Russia on the defensive at sea, advances in east and south
During the 76th and 77th weeks of the war, Ukraine continued to make territorial and psychological advances
Week 76
Bogged down in small-scale infantry attacks and incremental advances, Ukraine sought to gain an advantage in the 76th week of the war by attacking Russian shipping at range.
Drone footage Ukraine released on August 4 showed the prow of a surface drone approaching the Olenegorsky Gornyak, a Ropucha-class Russian landing ship, before going blank at contact range.
The attack happened just outside Novorossyisk harbour, supposedly a safe port on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, to which Russia had relocated much of its navy fleet based in Sevastopol after Ukraine sank its Black Sea flagship in May.
Daylight footage showed the Olenegorsky Gornyak listing severely to port as it was towed to Novorossyisk harbour.
“This poses a great dilemma for the Russians,” wrote Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategy at St. Andrews University. “Do they now deploy more of their surface assets to protect tankers and the like while they transit the Black Sea—which will make those warships inviting targets? Do they try to attack the Ukrainian coast—which has already shown itself to be deadly to Russian forces?”
Russia’s defence ministry said it destroyed two other surface drones near Novorossyisk on the same night.
Russian sources claimed a single compartment had been flooded and would be quickly repaired, but British military intelligence said the 30-40 degree list “suggests that several watertight copmpartments were breached.”
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov said the damage was “very significant” and repairs would keep it out of action for a long time.
Another Ukrainian surface drone struck a Russian fuel tanker the following night, damaging it severely. Russian news aggregator Baza said the drone flooded the tanker’s engine room.
The Moscow Times identified it as the SIG, under sanctions for ferrying jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria.
Reporters said the strike happened 27km south of the Kerch Bridge, which Ukraine has attacked twice before. These attacks on military and commercial shipping close to Russian mainland ports seem likely to continue. Ukraine’s State Hydrographic Service posted an open-ended notice to mariners announcing a “military threat” to a string of Russian Black Sea ports from the Kerch Strait to Sochi.
“Previous Ukrainian interdiction efforts have mainly focused on Russian military targets on land, but it seems that Ukrainian forces are now expanding their efforts to include naval targets as part of these efforts,” wrote the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, a think tank.
The ISW likened these strikes to those that preceded a successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv and Kherson in September last year, saying Ukraine was “now striking much deeper into Russian rear areas and incorporating maritime targets.”
Logistics strikes & Russian retaliation
Ukraine continued its long-standing strategy of striking Russia’s supply lines in its deep rear.
For example, Ukraine used HIMARS to strike 200 Russian soldiers exposed on a Crimean beach on August 1, continuing to be vigilant for long-range possibilities of taking out Russian equipment and personnel wherever the opportunity arose.
Geolocated footage on August 4 showed Ukrainian drones hitting close to an oil depot in Feodosia, on the Crimean peninsula. Russia claimed to have destroyed or intercepted all 13 Ukrainian drones.
Two days later, Ukraine succeeded in severely damaging a bridge across the Henichesk Strait, connecting parts of Crimea to the mainland. And for a second time in as many weeks, Ukraine struck the nearby Chonhar Bridge, another critical supply chokepoint further south.
Southern forces spokesperson Natalia Humenyuk said the strikes forced Russia to reroute supplies and troops through the western side of the Crimean peninsula, making their movement more predictable and vulnerable to a strike.
Russia responded with one of its largest salvoes of missiles against Ukraine in retaliation. Ukraine’s general staff said their forces shot down all 27 Shahed drones, 17 out of 20 Kalibr ship-launched cruise missiles and 13 out of 23 Kh-101/555 air-launched cruise missiles.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said the missiles were aimed at the Starokostyantyniv airfield, where Storm Shadow cruise missiles supplied by Britain and France are reported to be stored and launched.
Ignat said Ukraine has shot down some 1,200 Russian cruise missiles during the war, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it has shot down more than 2,000 Russian drones.
Eastern & Southern fronts
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said Ukraine’s southern forces had broken through Russia’s first line of defence “in some places” and were fighting against the internediate line.
But the only specifics offered during the week suggested meagre gains. Col. Mykola Urshalovych said Ukrainian forces advanced up to 650m into Russian defenses along a 1.5km front in the Melitopol direction on August 3.
The commander of Ukraine’s support forces, Brig-Gen Dmytro Gerega, said slow progress on the southern front was due to minefields, trenches, anti-tank concrete pyramids and barbed wire put up by Russian defenders. These defences were created in “strips” 10-40km long he said, and added that Ukraine needed more demining equipment and additional trained personnel.
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said Russian forces had built “stationary, fully-equipped, concrete-filled defence posts,” in the south, and that most progress was in the east.
“Over time, the Ukrainians have been securing the advantage,” wrote Royal United Services Institute defence expert Jack Watling in a Financial Times opinion piece. “The question now is whether they can push Russian forces to breaking point.”
Ukrainian forces were advancing slowly to reduce losses, Watling said, but were eroding Russian artillery by provoking it to fire, pinpointing it and destroying it. He called this a “turning point”, allowing Ukrainian troops to take Russian positions.
Saudi summit
Ukraine also pressed ahead with a diplomatic initiative to win international support and erode tolerance for Russia’s war.
Ukraine has enjoyed the unstinting support of NATO, Japan, South Korea and Australia. On August 6, diplomats from 42 countries including China and India, nominally supporters of Russia, joined a 42-nation summit in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to call on Russia to respect the principles of international law, including respect for Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The communiqué was a slap in the face of Vladimir Putin, who days earlier staged a summit with African leaders in St. Petersburg, attempting to put momentum behind his own quest to boost Russian grain and fertiliser exports.
The initiative suggested sanctions were biting into Russia’s economy. Reuters reported that Russia had doubled its defence spending to $100bn this year, representing a third of the budget.
Week 77
Ukrainian forces launched a new effort to land troops on the left bank of the Dnipro river in the 77th week of the war, where flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June had made counteroffensive action impossible.
They also continued to make incremental territorial gains ten weeks after launching a counteroffensive. Reports suggested they had at least partially taken the town of Urozhaine on the Zaporizhia-Donetsk border, and advanced on Robotyne in western Zaporizia.
At the same time, Ukraine withstood a major ongoing Russian offensive against the eastern town of Kupyansk, an apparent attempt to weaken Ukraine’s advances elsewhere.
Ukraine also continued to target supply lines in Russia’s deep rear. Russia’s defence ministry claimed to have foiled a Ukrainian attack on the Kerch bridge on the night of August 11, and to have shot down 20 Ukrainian drones over Crimea.
The left bank
Russian military reporters said Ukrainian reconnaissance groups were landing on the left bank of the Dnipro river west of Kozachi Laheri in the Kherson district in the days before August 11.
“The village is under the control of the Russian Armed Forces. However, the presence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine west of the Camps is a fact,” wrote one.
Russian positions were reportedly firing on the suspected locations of the Ukrainian units, but weren’t sending ground forces there.
Ukrainian special forces also continued to operate near the Antonovsky bridge, the reports said, despite the fact that Russia’s defence ministry claimed to have dislodged them on July 3.
Kherson is where Ukraine scored one of its largest territorial gains last September, but has been a largely ignored sector of the battelfield during the counteroffensive that began on June 4.
That’s because the area remained inoperable after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on June 6, which flooded hundreds of square kilometres on both sides of the river.
Ukraine’s general staff said Russian forces, which had been in possession of the dam, blew its engine room in order to make it impossible for Ukrainian forces to counterattack in the area, even though this also forced Russian units to pull back from their flooded defences for a while.
About a month later, once the flooding had subsided and the ground had dried, Ukraine reported that Russian units were returning to their positions and stepping up artillery attacks against the Ukrainian-held right bank of the river in order to deter crossings.
Those artillery tactics continued last week, according to Russian reporters, but it wasn’t clear if they had been effective. “An effective Russian mechanized counterattack could threaten this Ukrainian advance position, but it is unclear if Russian forces possess the mechanized reserves necessary to do so,” wrote the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, a think tank.
If Ukraine’s creeping reclamation of the left bank succeeded in establishing a bridgehead and and landing mechanised units, it could open a new front against Russian positions in the south.
Urozhaine
Geolocated footage posted on August 12 suggested that Ukrainian forced had entered the town of Urozhaine on the Zaporizhia-Donetsk border.
Russian military reporters claimed the Vostok battalion, which was defending the area, had abandoned positions in the northern part of Urozhaine and was fighting a rearguard in the south.
“For several days we withstood [Ukraine’s] onslaught, but somewhere there was a failure,” posted the battalion on Telegram. “We are still fighting back, but the situation is not in our favor… it's a matter of time.”
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar confirmed that Ukrainian forces were successful in Urozhaine and in the area of neighbouring Staromayorske, a town they recaptured on July 27, and were “taking hold of achieved boundaries.”
“No additional forces from the reserve were involved in this sector, no new artillery battalions were deployed - the battles are being fought with the forces that are available. Let's just say - poor forces,” wrote Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok.
Ukrainian forces also appeared to advance in western Zaporizhia, where they approached the town of Robotyne on August 11.
Russian reporters said Chechen fighters had been redeployed to reinforce the area, something confirmed by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Ukrainian forces launched a massive push towards Robotyne on June 26, and have kept Russian forces there on the defensive for seven weeks.
Russia’s reinforcement of Robotyne is unusual. Its inability to quickly move reinforcements to stressed areas of the front has been noted many times before.
Russian armed forces chief Valery Gerasimov reportedly dimsissed General Ivan Popov last month for complaining that his troops were overtstretched and in need of rotation in western Zaporizhia.
The eastern front
Russian forces continued an offensive towards Ukraine’s eastern city of Kupyansk, with some reports of success.
Ukraine, too, claimed to have advanced three sq. km. south of Bakhmut, which it is trying to encircle.
“Heavy battles continue in the Bakhmut direction. The enemy is trying to stop the advance of our troops and restore lost positions in the areas west of Klishchiivka, Andriivka, and Kurdyumivka,” said Hanna Maliar. “In the past week, the freed territory in the Bakhmut direction has been increased by 3 sq.km, and the total freed area in the Bakhmut direction is 40 sq.km.”
Ukrainian Col. Petro Chernyk told Ukrainian army media that the Russian offensive in Kupyansk aimed to relieve pressure on Bakhmut, where large numbers of Russian forces are committed.
“Bakhmut is in the lowlands, and all the dominant heights are under our control. So our defense forces are methodically exterminating their contingent there. It may come to such a scenario that a real encirclement will take place and their units will have only two options: be destroyed or surrender. If this were to happen, it would be a really serious step forward and a breakthrough in their defense and, above all, motivation,” he told Armyinform.
He said Russia had enough men to achieve a great numerical superiority in personnel at Kupyansk, but not the machinery.
Vadym Skibitskyi, the deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence, downplayed the Kupyansk offensive as reactive. “Operations carried out by Russia do not have a strategic military nature, they are only localized attacks," he told the Financial Times.