They appeared seemingly out of thin air starting on Wednesday: a few Russian armored vehicles, rolling south along the main road into Kupyansk, a city with a pre-war population of 26,000 along the front line in Kharkiv Oblast in northeastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainians expect the Russians to repeatedly attack in small assault groups: it’s the Russians’ standard tactic as their wider war on Ukraine grinds toward its fourth year.
The Ukrainians didn’t expect the Russians to deploy that tactic in Kupyansk, however. The city is 100 miles from each of the main loci of the wider war: Kursk Oblast in western Russia and the area around the Ukrainian fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
So it came as a surprise to the Ukrainian 114th Territorial Defense Brigade and adjacent units when those Russian vehicles showed up in northern Kupyansk. It seems they traveled several miles from their original positions to arrive in the city.
Drones eliminated the infiltrating Russians, but that’s little comfort to the rattled defenders of Kupyansk. The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies claimed the Russians sneaked into the city dressed in Ukrainian uniforms, but at least one Ukrainian soldier wasn’t content with such a pat explanation for the infiltration.
“There are no simple answers to difficult questions,” Yury Gorskyi wrote.
Gorskyi retrospectively sensed changes in the balance of power around Kupyansk. “Back in June-July, as well as at the end of spring, they [Ukrainian forces] gave the Russians a normal tax there,” he wrote. Russians would attack in groups of 10 or so, usually on foot—and promptly get wiped out.
The situation changed as summer wore into fall. “In recent months this direction resembled chaos,” Gorskyi wrote. “With the absence of a solid line, with a torn front, with a Russian [army] that one to two men at a time seeped deep into our rear.”
Ukrainian forces are tired and stretched thin all along the 800-mile front line of the wider war, but that’s not the only reason for the shift in momentum in the Russians’ favor. Russian infantry are no longer just sitting in their trenches most of the time, waiting for Ukrainian drones to dive down on them.
The Russian regiments north of Kupyansk always had enough infantry, even if those infantry were directionless and demoralized. More recently, the regiments “came up with motivation for that infantry.”
The source of that motivation should be obvious. Anticipating that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will lean on Ukraine to agree to an armistice that hands Russia control of any Ukrainian territory it occupies, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin has ordered his troops to go all out—and grab as much of Ukraine as they can as fast as they can ahead of Trump’s January inauguration.
The Russians “are prioritizing political goals above all,” wrote Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst with the Black Bird Group. That has translated into aggressive offensive action.
The Center for Defense Strategies predicted the Kremlin will reinforce the Kursk and Pokrovsk sectors at the expense of Kupyansk. For that reason, “the prospects for a large-scale offensive by the enemy remain unclear” in the city, the group stated.
But that doesn’t change the fact that a bunch of Russians rolled into Kupyansk in recent days without Ukrainian troops spotting them in advance. “The results at the tactical scale are already visible,” Gorskyi wrote. What happens on the wider scale remains to be seen.
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