Anticipating the Ukrainian counteroffensive that ultimately kicked off on June 4, Russian forces under the supervision of Army Gen. Sergey Surovikin this spring and early summer scrambled to complete three main defensive lines across southern Ukraine.
Military engineers and civilian contractors sprinkled concrete tank obstacles, dug trenches and—perhaps most importantly—laid hundreds of thousands of mines. The result, the Surovikin Line, is one of the most daunting military fortifications in the world.
The minefields north of the line are the main reason the Ukrainian counteroffensive corps has advanced just a few miles along its most important axes in southern and eastern Ukraine. But that slow rate of advance soon could change: on or right before Wednesday, the Ukrainian air-assault forces’ 82nd Brigade crossed the first of the three lines, just outside of Verbove in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
A drone video that the Russian army’s 100th Separate Reconnaissance Brigade posted online on Wednesday depicts the brigade calling in artillery fire on Ukrainian troops. The brigade might consider the video to be evidence of a battlefield victory. But consider where the artillery strike took place: on the formerly Russian side of the Surovikin Line’s outermost trench.
Observers anticipated this development. A week after liberating Robotyne, a key strongpoint on the road to Melitopol in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian brigades shifted their attention to the next town along the same axis: Novoprokopivka.
But every indication was that the lead brigades for the assault—the 82nd and the 46th Air Mobile Brigade—didn’t intend directly to assault Russian positions in Novoprokopivka, a town with a pre-war population of 800 that sits astride the T0408/0401 road threading south through Tokmak to Melitopol, 50 miles away.
No, the brigades pivoted east, toward Verbove, which once was home to 1,200 people. Their goal, apparently, is to liberate Verbove in order to flank Novoprokopivka and, in the process, get across the Surovikin Line’s outermost trench the easiest possible way.
The first line of Surovikin’s defenses is double-thick just south of Novoprokopivka. Moreover, the Russian 58th Combined Arms Army and other field armies have deployed twice as many regiments in Novoprokopivka as in Verbove. The arrival of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, Russia’s main operational reserve formation, might change this balance of forces.
But it might be too late for the 76th GAAD to save the Russian garrison in Verbove. The two Ukrainian brigades advancing on the city—the 46th and 82nd—are among the more powerful in the Ukrainian order of battle. And they’re fresh, too, having recently joined the 13-week-old counteroffensive.
It was no easy task, crossing the Surovikin Line. Surovikin himself has been forced into retirement owing to his ties to the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s mutinous The Wagner Group mercenary firm.
But Surovikin’s defenses are testimony to the general’s competence. “We’re not just talking about trenches,” explained Ukrainian soldier Olexandr Solon’ko. “There’s an entire system of trenches, dugouts and even underground tunnels in some places.”
With elements of the 46th and 82nd Brigades on the far side of the outermost Surovikin Line, the brigades’ next task is to exploit the gap—and squeeze through entire battalions. After that, they’ll need to repeat the breach twice more in order to get through the entire Surovikin Line—and break through to Tokmak, the important middle strongpoint halfway along the road to Melitopol.
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