Russian troops are slowly advancing in several critical sectors along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. Sure, it’s costing the Russian armed forces between 1,200 and 2,000 troops and up to 100 vehicles a day, but that’s cold comfort to the outnumbered, outgunned Ukrainian troops in these sectors—and to the former residents of the towns and cities that have become battlegrounds.
In one key city, however, it’s the Ukrainians who are advancing. How they’re doing it speaks to the Ukrainians’ desperation as Russia’s wider war on their country grinds toward its fourth bloody year. To liberate the Russian-held quarters of Toretsk, an eastern city with a pre-war population of 35,000, Ukrainian troops are detonating entire highrises in the hope of burying the Russian troops sheltering inside.
Under the cover of darkness apparently sometime this week, Ukrainian national guardsmen with the 1st Omega Detachment raced toward a Russian-held highrise on Vulytsya Street in central Toretsk. While the gunner atop their armored truck blasted away with his heavy machine gun, the guardsmen in the back piled out, tossed heavy explosive charges into a hole in the side of the building and then leaped back into the truck.
“Let’s go!” one of the guardsmen barked. The truck sped away. Seconds later, the charges detonated, blowing out windows on several stories of the building.
It wasn’t the first time Ukrainian forces had demolished entire blocks of Toretsk in order to liberate them. In early October, close observers of satellite imagery, drone feeds and videos posted online by front-line forces noticed something unusual happening in Toretsk, where Ukrainian brigades and Russian regiments have been locked in brutal urban combat for months.
One analyst noted a pattern of Ukrainian strikes on Russian positions in Toretsk’s central highrise district. Amid the strikes, there were signs of close combat—evidence the Ukrainians were following up their bombardment with infantry assaults. After the assaults, the bombardment died down, indicating the Ukrainians had evicted local Russian forces.
The pattern holds. Around the same time the 1st Omega Detachment was demolishing that building on Vulytsya Street, Ukrainian troops advanced along nearby Ryaboshapka Street and “made minor progress,” according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies.
The Ukrainian National Guard is fighting with total abandon: bringing down entire building as they advance, street by street, into a city that’s steadily turning to rubble.
Flattening a city to save it is, on its face, an absurd tactic. But the alternative for the Ukrainian brigades in this sector is surrendering what’s left of Toretsk to the Russians and falling back to the next nearest settlement. That would almost certainly bring the fighting—and likely total destruction—to that settlement, instead.
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