Ukrainian brigades and battalions in the Kurakhove pocket in southern Donetsk Oblast are in a precarious position. But they’re not giving up without a fight.
One of Russia’s top objectives in Ukraine right now is to eliminate the nine-mile-deep Ukrainian-held salient between Andriivka in the west and Dalnje in the east.
Anchored in the north by Kurakhove and in the south by a string of villages including Kostyantynopolske, the salient is the main impediment to an uncomplicated Russian assault on Pokrovsk, a Ukrainian fortress city 25 miles to the north.
As long as the Ukrainians control the Karakhove pocket, they can threaten the flanks of the Russian 90th Guards Tank Division as it marches on Pokrovsk.
But the pocket itself is in danger of being cut off across its flanks. If the Russians can attack from Kostyantynopolske or some other southern village to Dachne or some other village in the north, they could encircle elements of several Ukrainian brigades.
“The Russian military command assesses that Russian forces will be able to close the Ukrainian pocket,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. noted. But the Ukrainian marine corps is determined to prove the Russian commanders wrong.
In a fierce battle on or just before Tuesday, a Russian assault group made a move on Kostyantynopolske. The Ukrainian 37th Marine Brigade met the attackers.
The Russian group, riding in at least five armored vehicles, was under drone surveillance the entire time as it rolled along a country road toward Kostyantynopolske. The vehicles managed to drop off their infantry before the Ukrainian bombardment began.
Drones swooped down. Artillery burst among the vehicles. “The vehicles were destroyed,” the Estonian analyst WarTranslated reported.
The destruction of the vehicles effectively stranded the disembarked Russian infantry in Kostyantynopolske. The 37th Marine Brigade sent its 505th Battalion to mop up. At least one ex-British Mastiff armored truck cornered the Russians in a clutch of homes in Kostyantynopolske.
The Mastiff’s gunner opened fire with a .50-caliber machine gun, shredding the Russians’ shelter.
The Kostyantynopolske skirmish is just the latest in a series of effective, but small-scale, combined-arms actions by Ukrainian troops defending against Russian assaults in Donetsk as well as in Kursk Oblast in western Russia.
But local victories may not amount to a wider win for the Ukrainians, especially in Donetsk. “Russian forces have continued to use frontal mechanized and dismounted infantry assaults to advance slowly but gradually into eastern and central Kurakhove and south of Kurakhove into Dalnje, which supports larger Russian efforts to eliminate the remaining Ukrainian pocket,” ISW observed.
With each yard they advance across the pocket, the Russians come closer to closing the pocket—and cutting off thousands of troops Ukraine can’t afford to lose.
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